LE CHÂTEAU DE BON-SÉJOUR
In Canizy, after the Germans were through with it, not one of its
forty-seven houses stood intact. Most were roofless shells, or fallen
heaps of brick. An occasional ell, a barn, a rabbit hutch, or a chicken
house,—such were the shelters into which the returning villagers crept.
Nor was there furniture. Pillage had preceded destruction and loaded
wagons had borne away the plunder of household linen, feather mattresses,
clothes presses, chairs or anything practicable, into Germany. Scattered
through the ruins to this day lie iron bedsteads twisted by fire, the
metal stands of the housewives’ sewing machines, broken farm tools and
fire-cracked stoves. One day, beside a half-demolished wall, I came upon
a group of little girls playing house. They had marked off their rooms
with broken bricks, set up for a stove a rusty brazier, and stocked their
imaginary cupboards with fragments of gay china. A grey, drizzling day
it was, and their toy _ménage_ had no roof. But was it more cheerless
than the hovels they called their homes, where their mothers, like them,
had gathered in the wreckage left by the Germans,—a stove here, a kettle
there, and a “Boche” bed of unplaned planks, perhaps, with an improvised
mattress of grass? I paused to regard the play house. “What is this
room,” I inquired. “_La cuisine_,” was the quick reply. “And this?” “_La
salle à manger._” “But this next?” “_Une salle à manger_,” came the
chorus. “Then all the rest are _salles à manger_?” “_Assurément_,” with
merry laughter. “O, I see. Are you then so hungry at your house?” And I
turned away with an uncomfortable conviction that they were.
[Illustration: —_Encore un autre petit frère?_
—_Oui, un petit belge._
[What, another little brother?
Yes, a little Belgian.]]
One after another, if you listen, the Village mothers will tell of their
return; with what hope against hope they looked for some trace of
vanished husbands, sons and daughters; with what despair they realised
the utter ruin. “My cat,” said one, “was the only living thing I found.
She was waiting for me on the doorstep.” But those were fortunate who
found even the door sills remaining to their homes. Those who were
shelterless took possession of some semi-habitable corner of their
neighbour’s outbuildings, or even of cellars, and furnished them with
what they could find. As I went about among them, in an effort to supply
immediate needs, I was continually told: “That cupboard, you understand,
is not mine. I am taking care of it for Mme. Huillard, who is with
the Boches. When she returns, I must give it up.” “This bed,”—a very
comfortable one, by the way—“belongs to M. de Curé, whom the Germans made
prisoner.” “Those blankets an English soldier gave me.” “This stove”—in
answer to a query as to whether a new one would not be appreciated—“well,
to be sure, it has no legs, but one props it with bricks, _et ça marche,
tout de même_!” The boast of the Prussians in regard to their handiwork
was true: “Tout le pays n’est qu’un immense et triste désert, sans arbre,
ni buisson, ni maison. Nos pionniers ont scié ou haché les arbres qui,
pendant des journées entières, se sont abattus jusqu’à ce que le sol fût
rasé. Les puits sont comblés, les villages anéantis. Des cartouches de
dynamite éclatent partout. L’atmosphère est obscurcie de poussière et de
fumée.”[4]
By the time of the arrival of our Unit, six months after the Great
Retreat, our villagers had recovered from the shock of their sorrow. They
had managed to save enough bedding and clothing for actual warmth; they
had planted and worked their gardens; they were used to the simplest
terms of life. This courage rather than the too-evident squalor, was what
impressed one on a first visit to Canizy. Dumb endurance drew one’s heart
as no protestations could have done. It made me long to make my home
among my villagers, so that I might the more quickly meet their needs.
But this could not be, because every habitable cranny was crowded to
capacity. Hence it was that I lodged with the rest of the Unit, four
miles away, at the _Château de Bon-Séjour_. Again, you will not find my
château so called upon the map. It is merely a name that represents to me
six months of hardship, of comradeship and of some small achievement that
made the whole worth while.
At the Château, then, but not in it, lived the Unit. For the Château,
a German Headquarters, and a most comfortable one, in its day, had
been wrecked in the best German style. There were seventeen of us,
American college women, to whom the Government had entrusted the task
of reconstructing thirty-six of the 25,000 square miles of devastated
France. Two were doctors, three nurses, four chauffeurs, and the rest
social workers. Among them were a cobbler, a carpenter, a farmer, a
domestic science expert; and of other manual labor there was nothing
to which they did not turn their hands. It was in the golden days of
early September that my companions reached the Château allotted them in
that indefinite area known as the War Zone, and became from that moment
a part of the Third Army of France. But I, for reasons best known to
the passport bureau of that army, did not arrive until October. The
seventy-mile run from Paris was made in our own truck, driven by two of
our chauffeurs. As we cleared the dusty suburbs and took the highway
northward, war seemed very far away. To be sure, we often passed grey
_camions_ rumbling to or from the front, or saw fleeting automobiles
containing officer’s whiz by. But the country, the fields of stacked
grain or of freshly seeded wheat; the apple orchards,—sometimes miles
of trees along the roadside festooned with red fruit,—poplared vistas
of smoke-blue hill and valley, with church spires and red roofs in the
distance,—all these spoke of peace. Even the air lay in a motionless
amber haze, spiced with apples and wood smoke and ferns touched by
frost. But suddenly war was upon us. As we topped a sharp rise we came
upon an empty dugout, about which stood a shell-shattered grove. Lopped
orchards followed, zig-zag trenches, a bombarded village set in fields
bearing no crop but barbed-wire entanglements and tall weeds turned
brown. The country became flatter as we hurried along, intent on reaching
the Château before dark. At intervals we made detours around crumpled
bridges. Occasionally a sentry halted us, to be shown our permits known
as _feuilles bleues_. By this time the sun was setting and caught and
turned to gold a squadron of aeroplanes. Like great dragon-flies they
coursed and wheeled and presently alighted, to run along the fields
to their canvas-domed hangars. In the after-glow, we could still see
occasional peasants or soldiers working late at ploughing with oxen or
tractors. But otherwise, mile on mile, the brown plain, dotted here and
there with scraggly thickets, lay deserted.
It was dusk when we turned off the main road between the half dozen
dynamited farm-houses that once formed a tiny village, past the little
church, and into the gate of the Château. To the rear of this ruined
mass, set in a row as soldiers would set them, were the three _baraques_,
or temporary shacks, which the Army had made ready for us. Very cheerful
they looked that night with the lamplight streaming from open doors and
windows, and the smell of savoury stew upon the air.
But morning revealed what darkness had hidden: the destruction which
this estate shared with the entire countryside. Of the noble spruces
and poplars, which had formed the two main avenues leading the one to
the church and the other to the highway, only a ragged line remained;
the rest lay as they had been felled, in tangles of crossed trunks. The
Château itself, an imposing building as one viewed it through the frame
of a scrolled wrought-iron gate, proved to be a rectangle of roofless
walls. The water-tower, draped in flaming ampelopsis, no longer held the
reservoir which had supplied in former days the mansion, the greenhouses,
the servants’ quarters and the stables. The greenhouses themselves, the
_jardin d’hiver_, and the _orangerie_, where were grown hot-house fruits,
retained scarcely one unbroken pane of glass. Dynamite had been employed
freely; but—an instance of German economy—the main roof of the greenhouse
had been demolished by the well-calculated fall of a heavy spruce. In
this same greenhouse were the remains of a white tiled tank, and a
heating plant which had involved the construction of three new buildings.
“_Voilà_,” said Marcel, the sixteen-year-old son of the gardener, as he
pointed it out, “the officers’ bath.”
Marcel and his mother (whom, we think, the Germans left behind because
of her too shrewd tongue) still take unbounded pride in the place. Even
before repairs were made on her own cottage, Marie routed Marcel out of
a morning to weed the flower beds and to fence off what, by courtesy,
she calls the lawn. By this last manœuvre she renders difficult both the
entrance and exit of our cars. She also refuses to open for us the wicket
for foot passengers, probably because in the days of Mme. la Baronne’s
hospitality there were none. Here entertaining was done on a patrician
scale. A French officer who stopped in passing, told us how he was in
the habit of coming each year to hunt in season. There was a gallery of
famous pictures. In short, the Château of his friend, Mme. la Baronne,
was the show place of the countryside. “To think,” said he, as he pointed
to a sign still standing beside the gate, “to think that dogs were
forbidden,—and yet the Germans came here!” Marie, having been left by
her mistress in charge of the property, carries the responsibility with
seriousness. A letter arrives: Mme. la Baronne desires that the vegetable
garden be always locked, and that no trees be cut. It is she, doubtless,
who directs that the lawn be preserved. “Poor Madame,” sighs Marie, “she
little knows. Pray heaven she may never return to see what the Boches
have done!”
With Marie’s and Marcel’s help, one can reconstruct from the ruins the
gracious comfort of the old estate, the hospitable kitchen, the chambers
warm in winter and tree-shaded in summer, the wide balustrades where
the guests sat in long summer gloamings, courting the breeze. It was
Marcel who pointed out the view one gains from the steps of the Château,
straight through gaping doors and windows, to the sundial from which
radiated the alleys of the grove: bronze oaks and beeches, golden plane
trees, spruces and tasselled pines.
How is the beauty of that day departed! Half of the grove lies now a
waste of scrubby second growth and fallen timber, for here the Germans
employed Russian prisoners as lumbermen. No longer the huntsmen and their
ladies pace the alleys. Now, on almost any day you may see old women
dragging branches from the woods to the _basse-cour_, to be cut up for
fuel. Twenty-six of them, no men, and only two children, the wretched
villagers had found in the Baronne’s stables their only shelter after the
razing of their homes.
Yet we entered the winter far less warmly housed than they. Our two-room
_baraques_ were supplemented in time by six portable houses which we had
brought from America; two we used as dormitories and the other four as a
dispensary, a store, a kitchen, and a dining room. Our furnishings were
of the simplest; camp beds, a stove for each building, a table, camp
stools, and shelves. Our wood—when we had any—was chopped by a vigorous
old lady who walked a mile and a half from the nearest village to do it.
Our laundry was done upon a stove a foot square in a small building known
as the Morgue: such having been its use during the German occupation.
Marie made our cuisine on her range in a hut which she had built into
the ruins of her cottage. Zélie carried food and dishes in baskets to
and fro from kitchen to dining room, a quarter of a mile apart. The one
luxury of our existence was hot water, prepared by Marcel in a huge
cauldron, and brought in covered metal pitchers to our doors.
Only once did Marcel fail us, and that was because the rightful owner of
the cauldron left the _basse-cour_ for her newly erected _baraque_. She
requested our kind permission to transport thither her property. “There
is another cauldron at Buverchy, which I think you could rent in place of
mine,” she suggested. “It belonged to my cousin, Mme. Bouvet, and is now
in Mme. Josse’s yard. No one is using it.” Marcel was dispatched to make
inquiries, and later, with horse and wagon, to fetch the cauldron home.
But meantime there had dawned a morning when we were not wakened by the
clump-clump of Marcel’s sabots, and the setting down of the water jug
with a thud upon the frozen ground.
For wood, we depended largely on the chivalry of nearby encampments of
troops, French, English, Canadian or American, to whom our need became
apparent. For food, we were supplied by the Army with our quota of
bread and a soldier, M. Jean, to fetch it. Vegetables and some fruit
we obtained from our villages, of which we had sixteen in our charge.
Often these were presents, thrust upon us through gratitude; nor could
we pay for them. Meat was plentiful in all the towns of the Zone, where
the Army was charged with supplying the civilian population with food.
Anyone, going on any errand, marketed; and the dispensary jitney, which
might have started in the morning with doctors, nurses, kits, and relief
supplies, often returned at night overflowing with cabbages, potatoes,
pounds of roast, bags of coal, and _bidons_ of oil.
Our relief supplies came through more regular channels, largely from
Paris, where one member of the Unit devoted all her time to buying.
These were either shipped to the nearest railroad station, or sent by
the French Army, free of charge, in a thundering _camion_. We never
knew when to expect this last, nor what it would contain. Sunday seemed
a favourite day for its arrival. On one occasion, there were three pigs,
loose and hungry, and no pen to put them in; seventy-five crated chickens
followed, with the request that the number be verified, and the crates
returned. Such were the colonel’s orders. But, seeing that the Unit
carpenter had to construct a chicken yard, this command was modified by a
judicious distribution of cigarettes. Mixed cargoes of Red Cross boxes,
stoves, bundles of wool from the Bon Marché which had burst _en route_,
and sundries, were even harder to deal with.
We had no store room. The _cave_ of the Château, seeping with tons of
débris which in places bent with its weight the steel ceiling, and open
along one whole side to the elements,—this contained our dairy, our
lumber, our fuel, our vegetables, our groceries, and our relief supplies.
It abounded in rats, cats, and bats. But such as it was, it was the
centre of our activities. By night often weirdly lighted with candles,
by day never empty, laughter rather than complaints floated from its dim
interior. Here we held our first store; here the children who had trudged
over from Canizy, Hombleux or Esmery-Hallon waited in line for their
milk; here were assembled and tied up the thousands of packages for our
_fêtes de Noël_. As winter advanced, we prepared for a day in the _cave_
by encasing our feet in peasants’ socks and sabots, and our hands in
worsted mittens. The soldiers in the trenches had nothing on us.
Whether at home or on the road, our days were long and arduous, and
seldom what we had planned. Even Sunday became part of the working
week, for then we attempted to entertain our official supervisors and
co-laborers, and all chance acquaintances. M. le Commandant of the Third
Army has dined with us; the ladies of the American Fund for French
Wounded, under whom we held our section, have come to call; the Friends
walk over from Esmery-Hallon where they are building _baraques_ for the
commune; a lonesome Ambulance boy who has tramped ten miles and must
retrace his steps before dark, drops in; a squad of Canadian Foresters
rides through the gate; reporters, accompanied by a French officer,
harry us with questions. But most frequent, and most welcome of all our
visitors, are our countrymen, the—th New York Engineers. They came from
home, those men, to be the first of our army under fire. But during the
early days of the autumn, their talk was not of their work, but of ours.
They brought us slat walks, called duck walks, to keep us out of the mud,
and wood, and benches, and stoves. They came with mandolins and guitars
and violins to give an entertainment to our villagers, and stayed for a
buffet dinner and dance. They sent their trucks to take us in turn to a
party at their encampment. But all that was before the Cambrai drive.
As we, in our _baraques_, listened night and day to that bombardment,
we little knew the heroic part taken in it by our Engineers. Surprised,
unarmed, with pick and shovel they stood and fought; and later, hastily
equipped with rifles, helped save the day for England on the bitterly
contested front. But you have doubtless read of them in the papers, for
they were the first of our soldiers to die in battle and to be mentioned
in the orders of the day.