IT is over a week since I wrote you. But I have really been very busy,
and not had a moment.
To begin with, the very day after I wrote to you, Amélie came down
with one of her sick headaches, and she has the most complete sort I
ever met.
She crawled upstairs that morning to open my blinds. I gave one look
at her, and ordered her back to bed. If there is anything that can
make one look worse than a first-class bilious attack I have never met
it. One can walk round and do things when one is suffering all sorts of
pain, or when one is trembling in every nerve, or when one is dying of
consumption, but I defy anyone to be useful when one has an active
sick headache.
Amélie protested, of course; "the work must be done." I did not see
why it had to be. She argued that I was the mistress, "had a right to
be attended to--had a right to expect it." I did not see that either.
I told her that her logic was false. She clinched it, as she thought,
by declaring that I looked as if I needed to be taken care of.
I was indignant. I demanded the handglass, gave one look at myself,
and I was inclined to let it slide off the bed to the floor, à la Camille,
only Amélie would not have seen the joke. I did look old and seedy.
But what of that? Of course Amélie does not know yet that I am like
the "Deacon's One Hoss Shay"--I may look dilapidated, but so long
as I do not absolutely drop apart, I can go.
So I told Amélie that if I were the mistress, I had a right to be obeyed,
and that there were times when there was no question of mistress
and maid, that this was one of those times, that she had been a
trump and a brick, and other nice things, and that the one thing I
needed was to work with my own hands. She finally yielded, but not
to my arguments--to Nature.
Perhaps owing to the excitement of three weeks, perhaps to the fact
that she had worked too hard in the sun, and also, it may be, owing to
the long run she took, of which I wrote you in my letter of last week, it
is the worst attack I ever saw. I can tell you I wished for a doctor, and
she is even now only a little better.
However, I have had what we used to call "a real nice time playing
house." Having nothing else to do, I really enjoyed it. I have swept
and dusted, and handled all my little treasures, touching everything
with a queer sensation--it had all become so very precious. All the
time my thoughts flew back to the past. That is the prettiest thing
about housework--one can think of such nice things when one is
working with one's hands, and is alone. I don't wonder Burns wrote
verses as he followed the plough--if he really did.
I think I forgot to tell you in my letter of last week that the people--
drummed out of the towns on the other side of the Marne, that is to
say, the near-by towns, like those in the plain, and on the hilltops from
which the Germans were driven before the 10th--began to return on
that night; less than a fortnight after they fled. It was unbelievable to
me when I saw them coming back.
When they were drummed out, they took a roundabout route, to
leave the main roads free for the army. They came back over the
route nationale. They fled en masse. They are coming back slowly, in
family groups. Day after day, and night after night the flocks of sheep,
droves of cattle, carts with pigs in them, people in carts leading now
and then a cow, families on foot, carrying cats in baskets, and leading
dogs and goats and children, climb the long hill from Couilly, or thread
the footpaths on the canal.
They fled in silence. I remember as remarkable that no one talked. I
cannot say that they are coming back exactly gaily, but, at any rate,
they have found their tongues. The slow procession has been
passing for a fortnight now, and at almost any hour of the day, as I sit
at my bedroom window, I can hear the distant murmur of their voices
as they mount the hill.
I can't help thinking what some of them are going to find out there in
the track of the battle. But it is a part of the strange result of war,
borne in on me by my own frame of mind, that the very fact that they
are going back to their own hearths seems to reconcile them to
anything.
Of course these first people to return are mostly the poorer class,
who did not go far. Their speedy return is a proof of the morale of the
country, because they would surely not have been allowed to come
back by the military authorities if the general conviction was not that
the German advance had been definitely checked. Isn't it wonderful?
I can't get over it.
Even before they began to return, the engineers were at work
repairing the bridges as far as Chalons, and the day I wrote to you
last week, when Amélie went down the hill to mail your letter, she
brought back the news that the English engineers were sitting astride
the telegraph poles, pipes in mouth, putting up the wires they cut
down a fortnight ago. The next day our post-office opened, and then I
got newspapers. I can tell you I devoured them. I read Joffre's order
of the day. What puzzled me was that it was dated on the morning of
September 6, yet we, with our own eyes, saw the battle begin at noon
on the 5th,--a battle which only stopped at nine that night, to begin
again at four the next morning. But I suppose history will sometime
explain that.
Brief as the news was in the papers, it was exciting to know that the
battle we had seen and heard was really a decisive fight, and that it
was considered won by the English and French--in a rainstorm--as
long ago as the 10th, and that the fighting to the east of us had been
far more terrible than here.
I suppose long before this our myriads of "special telegraph" men
have sent you over details and anecdotes such as we shall never
see. We get a meagre "communiqué official" and have to be content
with that. It is now and then hard for me, who have been accustomed
to something different.
None of our shops is open yet. Indeed almost no one has returned to
Couilly; and Meaux, they say, is still deserted. Yet I cannot honestly
say that I have suffered for anything. I have an abundance of fruit.
We have plenty of vegetables in Père's garden. We have milk and
eggs. Rabbits and chickens run about in the roads simply asking to
be potted. There is no petrol, but I, luckily, had a stock of candles,
and I love candlelight--it suits my house better than lamps. It is over a
fortnight since we had sugar or butter or coffee. I have tea. I never
would have supposed that I could have got along so well and not felt
deprived. I suppose we always have too much--I've had the proof.
Perhaps had there been anyone with me I should have felt it more.
Being alone I did not give it a thought.
Sunday afternoon, the weather being still fine and the distant
booming of the cannon making reading or writing impossible--I am
not yet habituated to it--I went for a walk. I took the road down the hill
in the direction of the Marne. It is a pretty walk--not a house all the
way.
It leads along what is called the Pavé du Roi, dropping down into the
plain of the valley, through the woods, until the wheat fields are
reached, and then rising from the plain, gently, to the high suspension
bridge which crosses the canal, two minutes beyond which lies the
river, here very broad and sluggish.
This part of the canal, which is perfectly straight from Condé to
Meaux, is unusually pretty. The banks are steep, and "tall poplar
trees" cast long shadows across grass-edged footpaths, above which
the high bridge is swung. There is no bridge here across the Marne;
the nearest in one direction is at the Iles-lès-Villenoy, and in the other
at Meaux. So, as the Germans could not have crossed the Marne
here, the canal bridge was not destroyed, though it was mined. The
barricades of loose stones which the English built three weeks ago,
both at the bridgehead and at a bend in the road just before it is
reached, where the road to Mareuil sur Marne turns off, were still
there.
The road along the canal and through Mareuil is the one over which
the German cavalry would have advanced had von Kluck's army
succeeded in crossing the Marne at Meaux, and it was patrolled and
guarded by the Yorkshire boys on September 2, and the Bedfords
from the night of the 3d to the morning of the 5th.
The road from the canal to the river, separated here by only a few
yards, leads through a wide avenue, across a private estate
belonging to the proprietor of the plaster quarries at Mareuil, to a
ferry, beside which was the lavoir. There is a sunken and terraced
fruit garden below the road, and an extensive enclosure for fancy
fowl.
The bank of the river showed me a sad sight. The wash-houses were
sunk. They lay under water, with their chimneys sticking out. The little
river piers and all the row-boats had been smashed and most of them
sunk. A few of them, drawn up on the bank, were splintered into
kindling wood. This work of destruction had been done, most
effectively, by the English. They had not left a stick anywhere that
could have served the invaders. It was an ugly sight, and the only
consolation was to say, "If the Boches had passed, it would have
been worse!" This was only ugly. That would have been tragic.
The next day I had my first real news from Meaux. A woman arrived
at Amélie's, leading two dogs tied together with rope. She was a
music teacher, living at Meaux, and had walked over thirty miles, and
arrived exhausted. So they took her in for the night, and the next
morning Père harnessed Ninette and took her and her weary dogs to
Meaux. It was over two hours each way for Ninette, but it was better
than seeing an exhausted woman, almost as old as I am, finishing
her pilgrimage on foot. She is the first person returning to Meaux that
we have seen. Besides, I imagine Père was glad of the excuse to go
across the Marne.
When he came back we knew exactly what had happened at the
cathedral city.
The picturesque mill bridges across the Marne have been partly
saved. The ends of the bridges on the town side were blown up, and
the mills were mined, to be destroyed on the German approach. Père
was told that an appeal was made to the English commanders to
save the old landmarks if possible, and although at that time it
seemed to no one at all likely that they could be saved, this
precaution did save them. He tells me that blowing up the bridge-
heads smashed all the windows, blew out all the doors, and damaged
the walls more or less, but all that is reparable.
Do you remember the last time we were at Meaux, how we leaned on
the stone wall on that beautiful Promenade des Trinitaires, and
watched the waters of the Marne churned into froth by the huge
wheels of the three lines of mills lying from bank to bank? I know you
will be glad they are saved. It would have been a pity to destroy that
beautiful view. I am afraid that we are in an epoch where we shall
have to thank Fate for every fine thing and every well-loved view
which survives this war between the Marne and the frontier, where
the ground had been fought over in all the great wars of France since
the days of Charlemagne.
It seems that more people stayed at Meaux than I supposed.
Monsignor Morbeau stayed there, and they say about a thousand of
the poor were hidden carefully in the cellars. It had fourteen thousand
inhabitants. Only about five buildings were reached by bombs, and
the damage is not even worth recording.
I am sure you must have seen the Bishop in the days when you lived
in Paris, when he was curé at St. Honoré d'Eylau in the Place Victor
Hugo. At that time he was a popular priest--mondain, clever and
eloquent. At Meaux he is a power. No figure is so familiar in the
picturesque old streets, especially on market day, Saturday, as this
tall, powerful-looking man in his soutane and barrette, with his air of
authority, familiar yet dignified. He seems to know everyone by name,
is all over the market, his keen eyes seeing everything, as influential
in the everyday life of his diocese as he is in its spiritual affairs, a
model of what a modern archbishop ought to be.
I hear he was on the battlefield from the beginning, and that the first
ambulances to reach Meaux found the seminary full of wounded
picked up under his direction and cared for as well as his resources
permitted. He has written his name in the history of the old town
under that of Bossuet--and in the records of such a town that is no
small distinction.
The news which is slowly filtering back to us from the plains is another
matter.
Some of the families in our commune have relatives residing in the
little hamlets between Cregy and Monthyon, and have been out to
help them re-install themselves. Very little in the way of details of the
battle seems to be known. Trees and houses dumbly tell their own
tales. The roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at
work. Huge trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men
are at work, uprooting them and cutting the wood into lengths and
piling it neatly along the roadside to be carted away. The dead are
buried, and Paris automobiles are rapidly removing all traces of the
battles and carrying out of sight such disfigurements as can be
removed.
But the details we get regarding the brief German occupation are too
disgusting for words. It is not the actual destruction of the battle--for
Barcy alone of the towns in sight from here seems to be practically
destroyed--which is the most painful, it is the devastation of the
German occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the
houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the
records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it. The
deliberate ingenuity of the nastiness is its most debasing feature. At
Penchard, where the Germans only stayed twenty-four hours, many
people were obliged to make bonfires of the bedding and all sorts of
other things as the only and quickest way to purge the town of danger
in such hot weather.
I am told that Penchard is a fair example of what the Germans did in
all these small towns which lay in the line of their hurried retreat.
It is not worth while for me to go into detail regarding such disgusting
acts.
Your imagination, at its most active, cannot do any wrong to the race
which in this war seems determined to offend where it cannot
terrorize.
It is wonderfully characteristic of the French that they have accepted
this feature of their disaster as they have accepted the rest--with
courage, and that they have at once gone to work to remove all the
German "hall-marks" as quickly as possible--and now have gone
back to their fields in the same spirit.
It was not until yesterday that I unpacked my little hat-trunk and
carefully put its contents back into place.
It has stood all these days under the stairs in the salon--hat, cape,
and gloves on it, and shoes beside it, just as I packed it.
I had an odd sensation while I was emptying it. I don't know why I put
it off so long. Perhaps I dreaded to find, locked in it, a too vivid
recollection of the day I closed it. It may be that I was afraid that, with
the perversity of inanimate things, it had the laugh on me.
I don't believe I put it off from fear of having to repack it, for, so
far as I can know myself, I cannot find in my mind any signs, even,
of a dread that what had happened once could happen again. But
I don't know.
I wish I had more newsy things to write you. But nothing is happening
here, you see.