A VILLAGE IN PICARDY
[Illustration: A WELL-KNOWN TUNE]
A VILLAGE IN
PICARDY
BY
RUTH GAINES
AUTHOR OF “THE VILLAGE SHIELD,” ETC.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON
_President of Smith College_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE.
The history and the work of the Smith College Relief Unit in the Somme
is known wherever reconstruction work in France is spoken of. This brief
account does not purport to give anything but a small cross-section, the
picture of but one of the villages in our care. It is told in the first
person to make the telling easier. As I have said, of all our villages,
Canizy was the most beloved. All the Unit had a share in it.
The picture is given as it was seen day by day. What was true in this
section, may not be true in another. Here the German retreat was so
rapid that the devastation, though appalling, was not complete; whole
avenues of trees were left standing in places, and only two churches were
dynamited, by contrast with the two hundred and twenty-five destroyed
throughout the _région dévastée_. It was perhaps in more calculated ways
that the Prussians here vented their spite; in the burning of family
pictures, the wrecking of machinery, the cutting of the trees about the
Calvaries, and the taking away of the bells from the church towers. They
left behind them here, as everywhere, ruin and silence; a silence of
industry, of agriculture, of all the normal ways of life; a silence which
has given the plain of Picardy the name of “The Land of Death.”
RUTH GAINES.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I UN VILLAGE TOUT OUBLIÉ 3
II LE CHÂTEAU DE BON-SÉJOUR 16
III M. LE MAIRE 35
IV O CRUX, AVE! 48
V MME. GABRIELLE 61
VI VOILÀ LA MISÈRE 74
VII NOUS SOMMES DIX 88
VIII UNE DISTRIBUTION DE DONS 100
IX EN PERMISSION 113
X A LA FERME DU CALVAIRE 129
XI LES PETITS SOLDATS 139
XII M. L’AUMÔNIER 151
XIII HEUREUX NOËL 162
XIV FIDELISSIMA, PICARDIE 176
ILLUSTRATIONS[1]
A Well-Known Tune _Frontispiece_
Map of the German Retreat[2] 2
“They are over there” 12
“What, another little Brother!” 17
“Only that much Bread!” 44
“Is that wounded Man a Boche?” 51
“He is big already” 58
“I didn’t do that!” 63
“Once, before the War, the _Pralines_ were two for a Sou” 80
“A Cut of a Sword-scabbard!” 114
“If I were grown up!” 124
“Our House used to be there!” 132
“And do the little Boche children hug their Father?” 143
“Company, halt!” 148
“If it hadn’t been for the Officer....” 157
“He has not come. He has been mobilized....” 165
“Well, if we don’t see Santa Claus, we may see a Zeppelin” 171
“And if it freezes to-night?” 174
“Oh yes, Papa is strong!” 182
Plan of the Village 188
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
No one, it may safely be said, can see this war as a whole. The nations
taking part in it girdle the world, and no people is unaffected by it.
Real knowledge can be gained of only comparatively small sections of the
conflict, and we are grateful to those who, knowing a small section,
give us a faithful account of their own observation and experience, and
refrain from speculation and generalisation.
Among the infinitude of tragedies few have appealed more poignantly to
our imaginations than those involved in the devastation of Picardy; and
among the attempts at salvage few details have attracted the sympathetic
attention of America more powerfully than the efforts of the Smith
College Relief Unit. Their heroic persistence in the work of evacuation
under the very guns of the great offensive of March, 1918, made the
members of the Unit suddenly conspicuous; but the more picturesque feats
of that terrible emergency had been preceded by a long winter of quiet
work. The material results were largely wiped out; the spiritual results
will remain. It is the method of that work as carried on in a single
village that is described in this little book. When we have read it we
know what kind of people these were who clung to the remnants of their
homes in the midst of desolation. Their character and temper are depicted
with kindly candour; they were very human and very much worth saving.
When the time comes for reconstruction on a large scale, such an account
as this will be of value in enabling us to realise the nature of the task
and in teaching us how to set about it.
Smith College is proud of what these graduates have done and are doing;
and this note is written to assure the Unit rather than the outside world
that those who have to stay at home see and understand.
WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON.
_Smith College, Northampton, Mass._
A VILLAGE IN PICARDY
[Illustration: THE GERMAN RETREAT]
CHAPTER I
UN VILLAGE TOUT OUBLIÉ
As a relief visitor, in a Unit authorized by the French Government _au
secours dans la région dévastée_, I have lived recently in the Department
of the Somme. There I had in my care a village with a personality which
I venture to think is typical of Picardy. As such, I would present it to
you.
It was on a winter’s morning, by snow and lantern light, that I traversed
for the last time a road grown familiar to me through months of use,
the road which led from our encampment, known as that of the “Dames
Américaines” at Grécourt, past the railroad station of Hombleux to
the hamlet of Canizy. It leads elsewhere, of course, this road; to
the military highway for instance, which has already seen in the last
three years three momentous troop movements: the advance and retreat
of the French, the advance and retreat of the Germans, and, again, the
victorious sweep of the French and British armies which reclaimed,
just a year ago, the valleys of the Somme. It leads to the front, that
fluctuating line, some twelve miles distant, in the shelter of which we
have lived and worked for the ruined countryside. It is an important
route, on some occasions choked with artillery, on others with blue
columned infantry swinging down its vista arched with elms. Officers’
cars flash by there, and deafening _camions_. But for me, until this the
morning of my departure, it has led to Canizy.
There is no longer a station at Hombleux, because the Germans destroyed
it. One therefore paces the platform and stamps one’s feet with the
cold. Down the track, from the direction of Canizy, the headlight of
the engine will presently emerge. All about, the plain lies white and
level; the break in the hedge where a footpath crosses the tracks to the
village is almost visible. In fancy, I take it, past a fire-gutted farm
house and eastward on a long curve across fields where the snow hides
an untilled growth of weeds. The highway which parallels the railroad,
recedes in a perspective of marching trees, till, topping a little
rise, a wooden scaffold stands clear against the sky. It was formerly a
German observation post. To the left, equally gaunt, rises the Calvary
which marks the entrance to the village. And beyond, cupped in a gentle
declivity, lie the ruins of Canizy, framed in snow. So I saw it last; so
all the way to Amiens, and from Amiens to Paris, as the train bore me
away, I saw it; so in its misery and its beauty, I would picture it to
you.
You will not find my hamlet on any map of the _région dévastée_ with
which I am familiar; it is not listed among the destroyed villages of
the Department, although it was looted, dynamited and defaced, even
to the cutting of the oak trees about its Calvary. You would have to
search minutely in history for any mention of it among the King’s
towns of Picardy which became famous in guarding his frontier of the
Somme. Comparatively modern and quite insignificant, it lies beside a
tree-bordered, dyked canal, one of many which tapped the rich plain and
bore the produce of farm and garden to the market centres, of Péronne,
Ham and St. Quentin. To this canal sloped its fields of chicory, leeks,
pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, carrots and other garden truck. Crooked
lanes, brick-walled or faced with trim brick cottages, led from it back
through the village to higher ground. There, before the war, the _grands
cultivateurs_, such as M. le Maire, and M. Lanne, who rents the old
Château, would have ploughed and sown their winter wheat.
In those days, Canizy had a railroad also, and I have heard how for
three sous one could travel by it to Nesle. It took only eight minutes
then,—but now! By it as well, one went more quickly than by canal to St.
Quentin or Péronne with perhaps a hundred huge baskets of vegetables
on market day. But the Germans tore up the bed of the railroad and
destroyed the locks of the canal. They blew up, too, the bridge on the
main highway which used to pass the Calvary at the foot of the village
street. Cut off, reached only by a circuitous and deep-rutted road which
is impassable at certain hours every day owing to _mitrailleuse_ practice
across it, Canizy lapsed into oblivion. As its mayor said on our first
visit, “Look you, it has been quite forgotten,—_c’est un village tout
oublié_.”
In 1914, Canizy had 445 inhabitants. Of these, there were perhaps half
a dozen substantially well off, such as M. le Maire, possessing ten
hectares of wheat land, a herd of seven cows, four horses, thirty rabbits
and fifty hens. Besides, M. le Maire, or his wife, was proprietor of one
of the three village _épiceries_. Joined with him in respectful mention
by the townspeople are the lessee of the Château, and various owners
of property not only in Canizy but in the surrounding country. Of these
gentry, not one apparently had been made prisoner by the Germans. They
were to be found on their other estates, at Compiègne, at Ham, or in
Paris. Even the real mayor was an absentee, so that the acting mayor,
lame, red-faced and heady-eyed, was the only representative of landed
interests left in the little town. He had had, however, a dozen or more
neighbours scarcely less comfortably provided with worldly goods than
himself: M. Picard, for instance, who owned extensive market gardens
and employed six workers in the fields. He it was who did not suffer
even during the German occupation, for was he not placed in charge of
the _ravitaillement_? And though his friends the Germans took him away
with them, a prisoner, did not his wife and children live well on his
buried money, eh? _O, Mme. Picard, elle était riche._ There were the
Tourets, two brothers, who held connecting high-walled gardens in the
centre of the village, and their next door neighbour, the comely widow,
Mme. Gabrielle. Directly opposite ranged the Cordier farm, comprising an
orchard of 360 trees, ten cows, two bulls, one ox, eighty-seven pigs,
three horses, one hundred and fifty chickens, and one hundred and fifty
rabbits. Smaller cottages there were, some rented, but most of them
owned, where the families raised just enough for their own necessities,
or worked for their more prosperous townsfolk. There were the village
cobbler, the two store keepers who competed with the mayor, a sprinkling
of factory hands who walked along the dyke a mile and a half to work in
the brush factory at Offoy, and last on the street, but not least in
social importance, the domestics of the Château. There were, too, the
poor whom one has always; but in Canizy, so far as I could learn, they
consisted of but two shiftless families.
The civic life of the village centred about its public school and its
teacher, and, of course, its curé and its church. The monotony of toil
was relieved by market days and fête days and first communions and
neighbourhood gatherings. Of these last I have seen a few pictures,
groups of wrinkled grandparents and sturdy sons and grandchildren stiffly
posed in Sunday best, yet happy in spite of it. Behind them pleached
pear trees or grape vines make an appliqué against a patterned brick
wall. But there are not many of the pictures even left, for you will
understand, the Germans systematically searched them out and burned them
in great piles. The one that I remember best, a poor mother had torn out
of its frame the night of her flight. “I could not think well,” she said.
“The Boches had wrenched my Coralie away—so lovely a child that every
one on the streets of Ham turned to look at her curls as she walked—but
I did save this. See, there she is,—how pretty and good, and that is
my eldest, a soldier. He is dead. And that, with the accordion, is my
seventeen-year-old Raoul, like his sister, a _prisonnier civil_. What do
the Boches do, think you,” she continued, “with such? One hears nothing,
nothing. Never a letter, never a message. Even when Mme. Lefèvre and Mme.
Ponchon returned, they brought no word. The prisoners, evidently they are
separated. One is told that they work and starve,—that is all.”
A community so homogeneous in its interests, was bound to link itself
intimately by marriage as well. The intricacies of the family trees of
Canizy were a source of constant mental effort, as one discovered that
Mme. Gense was really Mme. Butin, that is, she had at least married M.
Butin, and that Germaine Tabary was so called because she was living with
her maternal grandparents, whereas her father’s name again was Gense, and
her mother was known by the sounding title of Mme. Gense-Tabary. “But
why these distinctions?” one continually demanded upon unravelling the
puzzles for purposes of record. “Because, otherwise, one would become
confused,” was the reply.
[Illustration: —_Ils sont là!!!_
[They are over there!!!]]
Such, peaceful, prosperous, yet stirred by family bickerings enough to
spice its days, was Canizy before the war.
Canizy to-day numbers just one hundred souls, fifty being children and
fifty adults. It was in March, 1917, that the village was blotted out.
Two years and a half of German occupation preceded that event. In every
house German soldiers had been billeted; one sees now on the door posts
the number of officers and men allotted, or the last warning, perhaps, in
regard to concealed fire-arms. For two years and a half the inhabitants
had been prisoners, for the same length of time there had been no school
and no mass. Yet the villagers do not speak unkindly of their conquerors.
They fared better than many, for they fell to the lot of the Bavarians,
who are reputed to be more humane than the Prussians. Besides, Picardy is
inured to invasions, which for centuries have swept across her plains.
By them, fortitude has been inbred.
But one day last spring, the Bavarians filed away northward. Prussians
succeeded them. Quickly came the order for the villagers to evacuate
their homes. At the same time, the able-bodied, men and women, youths and
maidens, were seized and held. Weeping mothers, tottering grandfathers,
and helpless children,—the remnant,—were driven forth with what scant
possessions they could snatch, to the town of Voyennes, four kilometres
away. There, huddled with the like refugees of other villages, they
remained ten days. From it they could see the ascending smoke, black
by day and red by night, and hear the detonations which marked the
destruction of their homes. They returned to the blackened ruins,—as,
in the words of a historian of the Thirty Years’ War, their ancestors
had done. “Les paysans,” he says, “qui avaient survécu à tant de
désastres étaient accourus dans leurs villages aussitôt que les ennemis
s’éloignèrent de ce champ de carnage. Mais, sans ressources d’aucune
sorte, sans habitations, sans chevaux, sans bestiaux, sans instruments
de culture, sans grains pour la semence, que pouvaient-ils faire?
Mourir——”[3]
But our villagers, though equally pillaged in the year 1917, were not
doomed to death. The Germans had retreated before the advancing French
and British armies, and the ruins of Canizy ere long were held by
Scottish troops.