LES PETITS SOLDATS
Ou t’en vas-tu, soldat de France,
Tout equipé, prêt au combat,
Ou t’en vas-tu, petit soldat?
_C’est comme il plaît à la Patrie,_
_Je n’ai qu’ à suivre les tambours._
_Gloire au drapeau,_
_Gloire au drapeau._
_J’aimerais bien revoir la France,_
_Mais bravement mourir est beau._
So, in chorus, sang the children of my village, day after day, as they
marched and circled about us up and down the streets. A catching tune; a
laughing eye; did they realise that only twelve miles away on the firing
line their soldiers were dying for the glory of the flag? No, it was not
possible for them, fugitives though they themselves had been, to live the
horrors of war. As Mme. Gabrielle said: “The children laugh; they do not
know that our world is destroyed, and it is well.”
Yet it would be hard to find a more manly group of boys in any land than
those of Canizy. They were soldiers, even in their dress; blue caps,
and blue or khaki blouses and trousers which their mothers had cut and
made from the cast-off coats of passing troops, English or French as
the case might be. Stockings also were of a military colour; for as
Mme. Marie Gense explained: “One can find stockings in the trenches
sometimes,—dirty, of course, and ragged; but they can be washed and
raveled, and the yarn is excellent.” So it came about that little Robert
had one pair of stockings with blue tops and khaki feet, because, you
understand, there was not enough wool of one colour to complete them.
Above his wooden sabots, the straight splicing was plainly visible, if he
were ever _en repos_. But my memory of Robert is of tireless feet that
twinkled almost as merrily as his eyes. It was no hardship for him to
walk the eight miles back and forth to the Château of a morning for his
quart can of milk. Mud, rain, snow, it was all one to him. By the hand,
he often brought a younger cousin, Albert, aged six. Chubby-faced and
sturdy of leg was Albert, clad in a diminutive khaki suit, and a brown
visored cap which failed to blight his red cheeks. Robert, being brave
and unconscious, whistled the merry call he had been taught, “Bob White,
Bob White!” and smiled at all the world. But Albert, being shy, buried
his small nose between cap and muffler, hung his head, and if pressed too
far by unsought civilities, presented his back.
It would be small wonder if all the children of Canizy had been shy. With
their elders they were virtual prisoners during the German occupation.
They had no incentive to gather in groups, no church and no school.
Rather, they were taught to slip in and out in silence lest they attract
sinister attention. One of our little soldiers to the end of his life
will carry a mark of German brutality in a hand maimed by a too well
aimed grenade. Even since the Retreat, their life has consisted of
skulking more or less among the ruins. Raiding aeroplanes, by night or
day, drop bombs in their vicinity; for Canizy lies near to Ham, the
munition centre of the St. Quentin front. They hear the bombardments;
and the rumours fly that the Boches are advancing. Will the lines hold?
Their mothers keep eyes and ears open to the eastward. One refuses to buy
a stove, because she thinks it is too risky an investment; her husband
is sure the Germans will return, and a stove, it cannot be carried away.
“What will you do then, if the Germans come?” I ask. “_Fly_,” is the
universal reply. “_We know the Boches; better to die than remain._”
[Illustration: —_Et les momes Boches ils embrassent leur père?_ ...
[And do the little Boche children hug their father?]]
Even in the fields, a child cannot play. One day I was taken by a
bevy of laughing little girls to see an _obus_ which had fallen in
the graveyard near the entrance to the church. It had lain there some
months unexploded, hidden by grass and weeds. But the preparations for
All Saints’ Day, as punctiliously made last autumn as in times of
peace, revealed it. The girls danced about it like sprites, touching it
spitefully with their toes. “Take care,” I cried. “Come away.” Merry
laughter greeted my alarm. “There are many of them,” said dare-devil
Thérèse; “they do no harm.” Nevertheless, knowing that a farmer had been
killed while ploughing, not far away, by just such a shell, I sent word
to the military authorities who removed this particular _obus_, before
the next Sunday’s mass. The Government recognises the danger, and prints
large placards of warning, which are hung up in the schoolrooms.
The schools themselves are depressing enough, for against no class of
buildings did the Germans vent more hatred. Throughout the devastated
area, they were completely destroyed. _Ecole des Filles_, or _Ecole des
Garçons_ may still be seen in white capitals adorning a gaping arch or a
jagged wall. But the schools, such as they are, are held in half-ruined
dwellings, or in _baraques_. One such dilapidated interior bore, beside
the warning against spent shells, the following “Fable for the day,”
written in the teacher’s slant hand upon the blackboard: “At our last
breath, we shall have nothing. Since we have neither father nor mother,
we are now orphans. Nevertheless, we must do right. We must do right
because it is right.”
In Canizy, as I have said, there was no school. The walls even of the
former school building were razed to the ground. But the children were
supposed to attend the school of another commune, that of Offoy, a mile
and a half distant along the canal. This seemingly simple provision for
education was made impossible by the fact that regiments continuously
_en repos_ at Offoy used the sandy buttes formed by the Somme at this
point for _mitrailleuse_ practice. One saw them every afternoon at half
past two, bringing out their gruesome targets, in the shape of a human
head and shoulders, and sentineling the crossroads with notices and red
flags. Then woe to the urchin lingering perhaps in Offoy on some belated
errand. Like the rabbits he must stay under cover until the fusillades
should cease. Yet the children of the village were not wholly neglected.
It was their former teacher, now resident in Hombleux, who taught them
the stirring _Petit Soldat_. And from Offoy came M. l’Aumônier, of whom
you shall hear later, to teach them the catechism and to receive them
into the church. “They are very _gentils_, the children of Canizy,”
he assured me one day. “They are not like the children of the other
villages. They have brave parents; they are well brought up.”
Well brought up, yes, in all the usages of docility and endurance.
Shifting of troops, obedience to military masters, slavery and pillage,
such are the facts which these children have learned for three years. But
grafted as the lesson has been upon a spirit gentle by nature, the result
is terrible in its sombreness. Robert Gense, uncannily helpful; Raymond
Carpentier, threadbare and bowed at fourteen,—a look like that of a
faithful, whipped dog in his eyes,—Elmire Carlier, whose lovely mouth is
carved in patience, the Tabarys, ragged and elfin—these are the children
of Picardy. But where is the spontaneity of childhood? Where may one find
it in the track of war?
[Illustration: _Garde à vous!_
—_Compagnie!... halte!_
[Company ... halt!]]
On our own playground, perhaps, sometimes. Yet the children had to
be encouraged to play. They might remember the words of the _rondes_
which have lately become familiar to American children also through the
illustrations of Boutet de Monville, but they no longer curtseyed as
the beautiful gentlemen and the beautiful ladies should _sur le pont
d’Avignon_. They no longer had books to read. A prayer book, a hymnal,
sometimes the family records; these were all the literature saved in
their mothers’ sacks of flight. But the play teacher draws our waifs of
the war as if with a magic flute; even M. Lanne’s cows come trooping
with the children, because the boy who herds them cannot come without.
The babies come, with older sister nurses; and on the outskirts may be
seen bent grandfather or grandmother, forgetting sorrow for the moment,
in watching the romping groups. And even after the store automobile,
stripped of its merchandise, honks persistently its desire to be off,
the joy of that brief hour is perpetuated in the books that the teacher
leaves behind. Who so proud then as the boy or girl singled out to be the
owner of a book for a whole week? _Contes des Fées_, _petites histoires_,
the _rondes_ themselves; they are treasures comparable to fairy gold.
Yet reading never seems to interfere with duty; Raymond, or Désiré, or
Adrien, you are likely to meet them as usual _en route_ to Voyennes for
apples, or returning from Ham with loaves of bread hanging, like life
preservers, about their necks; they pasture the few cows; they feed the
rabbits; they bring wood and dig coal,—they are the men of Canizy.
Such grow to be the soldiers of whom France is proud; those older
children, the _poilus_, whom all the world has come to know. Long ago
Julius Cæsar knew them also, and Hirtius Pansa wrote of them: “They make
war with honour, without deceit and without artifice.” Brought up to
adore _la Patrie_, singing of death, as of glory, the little soldier of
France marches to-day as did the child in the Children’s Crusade. Across
three thousand miles I hear his refrain:
_Point de chagrin,_
_Point de chagrin,_
_Il a sa gourde, il a sa pipe,_
_C’est un gaillard toujours en train._