More and more I find that we humans are queer animals.
All through those early, busy, exciting days of September,--can it be
only a fortnight ago?--I was possessed, like the "busy bee," to
"employ each shining hour" by writing out my adventures. Yet, no
sooner was the menace of those days gone, than, for days at a time,
I had no desire to see a pen.
Perhaps it was because we were so absolutely alone, and because,
for days, I had no chance to send you the letters I had written, nor to
get any cable to you to tell you that all was well.
There was a strange sort of soulagement in the conviction that we
had, as my neighbors say, "échappé bien." I suppose it is human. It
was like the first days of a real convalescence--life is so good, the
world is so beautiful. The war was still going on. We still heard the
cannon--they are booming this minute--but we had not seen the
spiked helmets dashing up my hill, nor watched the walls of our little
hamlet fall. I imagine that if human nature were not just like that, Life
could never be beautiful to any thinking person. We all know that,
though it be not today, it is to be, but we seem to be fitted for that,
and the idea does not spoil life one bit.
It is very silent here most of the time. We are so few. Everybody
works. No one talks much. With the cannon booming out there no
one feels in the humor, though now and then we do get shaken up a
bit. Everything seems a long time ago. Yet it is really only nine days
since the French troops advanced--nine days since Paris was saved.
The most amazing thing of all is that our communications, which were
cut on September 2, were reopened, in a sort of a way, on the 10th.
That was only one week of absolute isolation. On that day we were
told that postal communication with Paris was to be reopened with an
automobile service from Couilly to Lagny, from which place, on the
other side of the Marne, trains were running to Paris.
So Amélie gathered up my letters, and carried them down the hill, and
dropped them hopefully in the box under the shuttered window of the
post-office in the deserted town.
That was six days ago, and it is only this morning that I began to feel
like writing to you again. I wanted to cable, but there is no way yet, so
I can only hope that you know your geography well enough not to
have worried since the 7th.
Although we are so shut in, we got news from the other side of the
Marne on Wednesday, the 9th, the day after I wrote to you--the fifth
day of the battle. Of course we had no newspapers; our mairie and
post-office being closed, there was no telegraphic news. Besides, our
telegraph wires are dangling from the poles just as the English
engineers left them on September 2. It seems a century ago.
We knew the Germans were still retreating because each morning
the booming of the cannon and the columns of smoke were further
off, and because the slopes and the hills before us, which had been
burning the first three days of the battle, were lying silent in the
wonderful sunshine, as if there were no living people in the world
except us few on this side of the river.
At no time can we see much movement across the river except with a
glass. The plains are undulating. The roads are tree-lined. We trace
them by the trees. But the silence over there seems different today.
Here and there still thin ribbons of smoke--now rising straight in the
air, and now curling in the breeze--say that something is burning, not
only in the bombarded towns, but in the woods and plains. But what?
No one knows.
One or two of our older men crossed the Marne on a raft on the 10th,
the sixth day of the battle. They brought back word that thousands
from the battles of the 5th, 6th, and 7th had lain for days un-buried
under the hot September sun, but that the fire department was
already out there from Paris, and that it would only be a few days
when the worst marks of the terrible fight would be removed. But they
brought back no news. The few people who had remained hidden in
cellars or on isolated farms knew no more than we did, and it was
impossible, naturally, to get near to the field ambulance at
Neufmortier, which we can see from my lawn.
However, on the 9th--the very day after the French advanced from
here--we got news in a very amusing way. We had to take it for what
it was worth, or seemed to be. It was just after noon. I was working in
the garden on the south side of the house. I had instinctively put the
house between me and the smoke of battle when Amélie came
running down the hill in a high state of excitement, crying out that the
French were "coming back," that there had been a "great victory,"
and that I was to "come and see."
She was in too much of a hurry to explain or wait for any questions.
She simply started across the fields in the direction of the Demi-Lune,
where the route nationale from Meaux makes a curve to run down the
long hill to Couilly.
I grabbed a sunbonnet, picked up my glasses, and followed her to a
point in the field from which I could see the road.
Sure enough--there they were--cuirassiers--the sun glinting on their
helmets, riding slowly towards Paris, as gaily as if returning from a
fête, with all sorts of trophies hanging to their saddles.
I was content to go no nearer. It was no army returning. It was only a
small detachment. Still, I could not help feeling that if any of them
were returning in that spirit, while the cannon were still booming, all
must be well.
Amélie ran all the way to the Demi-Lune--a little more than a quarter
of a mile. I could see her simply flying over the ground. I waited where
I was until she came back, crying breathlessly, long before she
reached me:
"Oh, madame, what do you think? The regiment which was here
yesterday captured a big, big cannon."
That was good news. They really had not looked it.
"And oh, madame," she went on, as she reached me, "the war is
over. The Germans have asked for peace," and she sat right down
on the ground.
"Peace?" I exclaimed. "Where? Who told you that?"
"A man out there. He heard it from a soldier. They have asked for
peace, those Boches, and General Gallieni, he told them to go back
to their own frontier, and ask for it there."
"And have they gone, Amélie?" I asked.
She replied quite seriously that they were going, and she was terribly
hurt because I laughed, and remarked that I hoped they would not be
too long about it.
I had the greatest possible difficulty in making her realize that we
were only hearing a very small part of a battle, which, judging by the
movements which had preceded it, was possibly extending from here
to the vicinity of Verdun, where the Crown Prince was said to be
vainly endeavoring to break through, his army acting as a sort of a
pivot on which the great advance had swung. I could not help
wondering if, as often happens in the game of "snap the whip," von
Kluck's right wing had got swung off the line by the very rapidity with
which it must have covered that long arc in the great two weeks'
offensive.
Amélie, who has an undue confidence in my opinion, was terribly
disappointed, quite downcast. Ever since the British landed--she has
such faith in the British--she has believed in a short war. Of course I
don't know any more than she does. I have to guess, and I'm not a
lucky guesser as a rule. I confess to you that even I am absolutely
obsessed by the miracle which has turned the invaders back from the
walls of Paris. I cannot get over the wonder of it. In the light of the
sudden, unexpected pause in that great push I have moments of
believing that almost anything can happen. I'll wager you know more
about it on your side of the great pond than we do here within hearing
of the battle.
I don't even know whether it is true or not that Gallieni is out there.
If it is, that must mean that the army covering Paris has advanced,
and that Joffre has called out his reserves which have been
entrenched all about the seventy-two miles of steel that guards
the capital. I wondered then, and today--seven days later--I am
wondering still.
It was useless to give these conjectures to Amélie. She was too deep
in her disappointment. She walked sadly beside me back to the
garden, an altogether different person from the one who had come
racing across the field in the sunshine. Once there, however, she
braced up enough to say:
"And only think, madame, a woman out there told me that the
Germans who were here last week were all chauffeurs at the Galeries
Lafayette and other big shops in Paris, and that they not only knew all
the country better than we do, they knew us all by name. One of
them, who stopped at her door to demand a drink, told her so himself,
and called her by name. He told her he had lived in Paris for years."
That was probably true. The delivery automobiles from all the big
shops in Paris came out here twice, and some of them three times a
week. It is no secret that Paris was full of Germans, and has been
ever since that beastly treaty of Frankfort, which would have expired
next year.
After Amélie had gone back to her work, I came into the library and
sat down at my desk to possess my soul with what patience I could,
until official news came. But writing was impossible.
Of course to a person who has known comparatively few restraints of
this sort, there is something queer in this kind of isolation. I am afraid
I cannot exactly explain it to you. As I could not work, I walked out on
to the chemin Madame. On one side I looked across the valley of the
Marne to the heights crowned by the bombarded towns. On the other
I looked across the valley of the Grande Morin, where, on the heights
behind the trees, I knew little towns like Coutevoult and Montbarbin
were evacuated. In the valley at the foot of the hill, Couilly and St.
Germain, Montry and Esbly were equally deserted. No smoke rose
above the red roofs. Not a soul was on the roads. Even the railway
station was closed, and the empty cars stood, locked, on the side-
tracks. It was strangely silent.
I don't know how many people there are at Voisins. I hear that there
is no one at Quincy. As for Huiry? Well, our population--everyone
accounted for before the mobilization--was twenty-nine. The hamlet
consists of only nine houses. Today we are six grown people and
seven children.
There is no doctor if one should be so silly as to fall ill. There are no
civil authorities to make out a death certificate if one had the bad
taste to die--and one can't die informally in France. If anyone should,
so far as I can see, he would have to walk to his grave, dig it, and lie
down in it himself, and that would be a scandal, and I am positive it
would lead to a procès. The French love lawsuits, you know. No
respectable family is ever without one.
However, there has not been a case of illness in our little community
since we were cut off from the rest of the world.
Somehow, at times, in the silence, I get a strange sensation of
unreality--the sort of intense feeling of its all being a dream. I wish I
didn't. I wonder if that is not Nature's narcotic for all experiences
outside those we are to expect from Life, which, in its normal course,
has tragedies enough.
Then again, sometimes, in the night, I have a sensation as if I were
getting a special view of a really magnificent spectacle to which the
rest of "my set" had not been invited--as if I were seeing it at a risk,
but determined to see it through.
I can imagine you, wrinkling your brows at me and telling me that that
frame of mind comes of my theatre-going habit. Well, it is not worth
while arguing it out. I can't. There is a kind of veil over it.
Nor were the day's mental adventures over.
I was just back from my promenade when my little French friend from
the foot of the hill came to the door. I call her "my little friend,"
though she is taller than I am, because she is only half my age.
She came with the proposition that I should harness Ninette and go
with her out to the battlefield, where, she said, they were sadly in
need of help.
I asked her how she knew, and she replied that one of our old men
had been across the river and brought back the news that the field
ambulance at Neufmortier was short of nurses, and that it was
thought that there were still many wounded men in the woods who
had not yet been picked up.
I asked her if any official call for help had come. She said "No," but
she presented so strong a case in favor of volunteering that, at first, it
seemed to me that there was nothing to do but go, and go quickly.
But before she got outside the gate I rushed after her to tell her that it
seemed impossible,--that I knew they didn't want an old lady like me,
however willing, an old lady very unsteady on her feet, absolutely
ignorant of the simplest rules of "first aid to the wounded," that they
needed skilled and tried people, that we not only could not lend
efficient aid, but should be a nuisance, even if, which I doubted, we
were allowed to cross the Marne.
All the time I was explaining myself, with that diabolical dual
consciousness which makes us spectator and listener to ourselves,
in the back of my brain--or my soul--was running this query: "I wonder
what a raw battlefield looks like? I have a chance to see if I want to--
perhaps." I suppose that was an attack of involuntary, unpremeditated
curiosity. I did not want to go.
I wonder if that was not the sort of thing which, if told in the
confessional in ancient times, got one convicted of being "possessed
of the devil"?
Of course Mlle. Henriette was terribly disappointed. Her mother would
not let her go without me. I imagine the wise lady knew that I would
not go. She tried to insist, but my mind was made up.
She argued that we could "hunt for the dead," and "carry consolation
to the dying." I shook my head. I even had to cut the argument short
by going into the house. I felt an imperative need to get the door
closed between us. The habit I have--you know it well, it is often
enough disconcerting to me--of getting an ill-timed comic picture in
my mind, made me afraid that I was going to laugh at the wrong
moment. If I had, I should never have been able to explain to her, and
hope to be understood.
The truth was that I had a sudden, cinematographical vision of my
chubby self--me, who cannot walk half a mile, nor bend over without
getting palpitation--stumbling in my high-heeled shoes over the fields
ploughed by cavalry and shell--breathlessly bent on carrying
consolation to the dying. I knew that I should surely have to be picked
up with the dead and dying, or, worse still, usurp a place in an
ambulance, unless eternal justice--in spite of my age, my sex, and my
white hairs--left me lying where I fell--and serve me good and right!
I know now that if the need and opportunity had come to my gate--as
it might--I should, instinctively, have known what to do, and have
done it. But for me to drive deliberately nine miles--we should have
had to make a wide detour to cross the Marne on the pontoons--
behind a donkey who travels two miles an hour, to seek such an
experience, and with several hours to think it over en route, and the
conviction that I would be an unwelcome intruder--that was another
matter.
I am afraid Mlle. Henriette will never forgive me. She will soon be
walking around in a hospital, looking so pretty in her nurse's dress
and veil. But she will always think that she lost a great opportunity that
day--and a picturesque one.
By the way, I have a new inmate in my house--a kitten. He was
evidently lost during the emigration. Amélie says he is three months
old. He arrived at her door crying with hunger the other morning.
Amélie loves beasties better than humans. She took him in and fed
him. But as she has six cats already, she seemed to think that it was
my duty to take this one. She cloaked that idea in the statement that it
was "good for me" to have "something alive" moving about me in the
silent little house. So she put him in my lap. He settled himself down,
went to sleep, and showed no inclination to leave me.
At the end of two hours he owned me--the very first cat I ever knew,
except by sight.
So you may dismiss that idea which torments you--I am no longer
alone.
I am going to send this letter at once to be dropped in the box in front
of the post-office, where I am very much afraid it may find that of last
week, for we have had no letters yet nor have I seen or heard
anything of the promised automobile postale. However, once a
stamped letter is out of my hand, I always feel at least as if it had
started, though in all probability this may rest indefinitely in that
box in the "deserted village."