O CRUX, AVE
As the aeroplanes fly, Canizy is perhaps three miles from the Château,
or reckoned in time, half an hour by motor and an hour on foot. But by
either route, one turns into the village at the stark Calvary I have
already mentioned, with its half obliterated inscription: _Ave, O Crux_.
At our first visit, despite our novelty, Canizy regarded us with
indifference. We seemed to them doubtless one more of those strange
manifestations of the war which had stranded them among their ruins.
Incurious, apathetic, they passed us with sidelong glances, and went
their ways. But this did not last long. The “Dames Américaines” did such
extraordinary things! They gathered and bought up rags; they played with
the children; they walked fearlessly, even at night, across the fields
to tend a sick baby; they slept—so the village children who had seen
their encampment reported—on _lits-soldats_. The village waked to a new
interest, and it came about that one expected to be waited for by the
gaunt old cross.
Before my arrival, the routeing of our three cars had already been
decided. Three times a week the Dispensary was held at Canizy, and once
a week, on Monday, our largest truck, turned into a peddler’s cart with
shining tinware, sabots, soap, fascinators, stockings and other articles
of clothing, made there its first stop. On the seat back of the driver
and the storekeeper, or if there were not room for a seat, on top of the
hampers, went also the children’s department, consisting of two members.
While the mothers, grandmothers and elder sisters gathered at the honk
of the horn about the truck, the children, equally eager, followed the
teachers to an open field for games. Or, did it rain, I have seen them
of all ages from fourteen years to fourteen months, huddled in a shed,
listening open-mouthed to the same tales our children love, which begin,
in French as in English, with “Once upon a time.”
But when, after a three-days’ inspection of our outlying domain, I
asked our Director for the village of Canizy, I was given charge of
all branches of our work there. This meant not interference but close
coöperation with the other members of the Unit already occupied with
its problems. Of all our villages, Canizy was the most beloved, not,
perhaps, because its need was greatest, but because its isolation was
most complete. No one could do enough for it. Were a sewing-machine to
be repaired, the head of our automobile department, a mechanical genius,
spent hours making it “marcher.” The doctors, with their own hands, took
time to scrub the children’s heads. They came to me with every need that
they found on their rounds, with the neighbourhood gossip, and with
kindly advice. The teachers gave me the names of children requiring
shoes; and, as the work developed, asked in turn for recommendations
in regard to opening a children’s library. To the farm department, I
made requests that we buy largely of fodder and vegetables, until we had
literally hundreds of kilos of pumpkins, turnips and carrots bedded for
us in the cellars, on call. To this department went also requisitions
that Mme. Cordier be supplied with a pig, or M. Noulin with five hens,
or Mme. Gense with a goat. Or, were there shipments of furniture to be
delivered, one called again on the automobile department, which even
through the drifts and cold of winter, kept at least one of its engines
thawed and running every day.
[Illustration: —_C’est un boche ce blessé là?_
—_Non, M’sieu le Major, c’est le cheval du capitaine._
[Is that wounded man a Boche?
No, Major, he’s the captain’s horse.]]
It will be seen that our scheme of material relief followed closely that
laid down by the Government. Our method was simple: where the Government
supplies were on hand, or adequate, we used them; whatever was lacking,
even up to kitchen ranges costing three hundred francs, we attempted to
supply. In this we had not only our own resources to draw on, but to
a limited extent, those of the American Fund for French Wounded, and
to a much larger extent, those of the Red Cross. In a huge truck came
the goods from the Red Cross, driven by a would-be aviator who, when
asked his name, replied bashfully, “Call me Dave.” “Dave” was frequently
accompanied by another youth of like ambition, named Bill. And I will say
that they handled their truck as if it were already a flying-machine.
The first consignment of hundreds of sheets and blankets, the truck and
the driver, all were overturned in our moat. It took a day to get them
out. The next mishap was a head-on collision with our front gate. But
the last, which I learned of just before I left, will best illustrate
their imaginative turn of mind. Bill, the intrepid, having attempted to
traverse a ploughed field, left his machine there mired to the body, and
spent the night with us. He seemed a trifle apprehensive as to how his
“boss” would take this exploit. Willing workers, however, were Dave and
Bill. Unannounced, they came exploding up the driveway under orders to
work for us all day. And many a time have we risked our necks with them,
perched on the high front seat, careering along at what seemed like sixty
miles an hour.
But for my part, my usual mode of travel was on foot, and my orbit
bounded by the Château, Hombleux and Canizy. In any case, even though I
went over by motor, I was dropped at my village and walked back across
the fields. As I grew better acquainted with the villagers, I came and
went at will, spending almost all the daylight hours—few enough in
winter—with them. Every one has heard of the mud in the trenches. The
clayey soil of our district, admirably adapted to the making of bricks,
lends itself equally well to the making of mud. Continually churned
by _camions_ and marching troops, it becomes on the highways of the
consistency of a purée, through which, high-booted and short-skirted,
one wades. It is therefore a relief to turn off by the footpath beyond
Hombleux, though it plunges for the first quarter of a mile through a
bog. Of a sunny day, birds sing in the hollow, wee _pinsons_ perched
on ragged hedges answering one another with fairy flutes. Farther on,
yellow-breasted finches dart over patches of mustard as yellow, and
sing as they fly. Raucous crows, whose gray-barred wings make them far
more decorative than ours, and the even more strikingly marked magpies,
darken in great flocks the newly ploughed and seeded wheatfields which in
increasing areas border the path. A sudden movement sends them whirring
like a black and white cloud against the sky. Often above them courses a
flier of another sort, a scout aeroplane probably, holding its way from
the aviation fields in our rear, to the front. It rasps the heavens like
a taut bow; by listening to the beat of its engines one can determine
whether it be French or Boche. For Boche planes come over us frequently,
on bombing raids; and sometimes one does not have to look or listen long
to know that an air battle is taking place overhead. The sharp reports;
the white puffs of our guns, the black plumes of the enemy’s; the glint
of the sunlight on careening sails high up in the blue,—it all passes
like a panorama, of which we do not know the end. Other sounds also are
familiar to us on our plain, when from the Chemin des Dames, or St.
Quentin, or Cambrai, the great guns boom. Like surges they shake and
reverberate; and when, as often happens, the sea-fog rolls in from the
Channel, one can well fancy them the breakers of a mighty storm. So they
are, out there, on our front, where the living dyke of the _poilus_ holds
back the German flood.
The highway and the railway, these are the two most coveted goals of
the German bombs. For over them go up the trains of ammunition and of
soldiers and supplies. Both we cross on the way to Canizy. The railroad,
running between well defined hedges, would seem almost as conspicuous
an object as the tree-sentinelled road. But, so far, both have escaped
harm. Trains whistle and puff as usual up and down from Amiens to Ham.
Often I halt at the crossing, to wave to soldiers, who fill the cars;
sometimes I pass through companies of red-turbaned, brown Moroccans,
who are brought here by the Government to rebuild bridges and keep the
roadbed in repair. Over the track the footpath carries one, on over brown
stubble, to the Calvary and Canizy.
As I have said, at the Cross one is awaited. Sometimes it is only one
little figure in black apron and blue soldier’s cap that stands beside
it to give the signal; sometimes from the wall on the other side of
the road, a half dozen girls start up, like a covey of quail. The boys
usually ran away, but the girls advanced to surround one, and dance hand
in hand down the street. But always before the Calvary there was a pause.
Brown hands, none too clean, were raised to forehead and breast with the
quick sign of the cross. One caught a whispered invocation. “But you do
not do it,” five-year-old Flore protested to me one day, with troubled
eyes. “Why do you not salute the Calvary?” “Teach me,” I replied; and in
chorus I learned the words which on the lips of the war-orphaned children
are infinitely pathetic: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the
Holy Ghost.”
[Illustration: —_Il est déjà grand!..._
—_Ben ... il a l’âge de la guerre._
[He is big already!
Well ... he is as old as the war.]]
It is not alone at Canizy that one finds the Cross, though by its
aloofness above the plain this one became impressive. By every roadside
stands a Calvary, sometimes embowered in trees, but more often stark
and naked, with the wantonly felled trunks about its base bearing
mute Witness to a desecration which respected the form, but not the
spirit, of the Christ. At Hombleux, three such crucifixes marked the
intersections of the village lanes, flanked by stenciled guide-posts: _A
Nesle_, _A Athies_, or _A Roye_. They cluster in the cemeteries, above
well-remembered graves; Where even the dead no longer rest inviolate,
since the Germans, to their unspeakable shame, have blasted open many a
tomb. Day by day, the obsession grows on one that these uplifted symbols
of suffering, stripped and mocked and defiled by the invader, typify the
crucifixion of Picardy.