August 10,1914.
I have your cable asking me to come "home" as you call it. Alas, my
home is where my books are--they are here. Thanks all the same.
It is a week since I wrote you--and what a week. We have had a sort of
intermittent communication with the outside world since the 6th, when,
after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional
newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.
After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being declared
all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and
Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all. Day after day Amelie would
run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin--half a
dozen lines of facts--that was all we knew from day to day. It is all
we know now.
Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over my
head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew. Often I would see
five in the day, and one day ten. Day after day I watched the men of
the commune on their way to join their classe. There was hardly an hour
of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to groups of stern, silent
men, accompanied by their women, and leading the children by the hand,
taking the short cut to the station which leads over the hill, right by
my gate, to Couilly. It has been so thrilling that I find myself
forgetting that it is tragic. It is so different from anything I ever
saw before. Here is a nation--which two weeks ago was torn by political
dissension--suddenly united, and with a spirit that I have never seen
before.
I am old enough to remember well the days of our Civil War, when
regiments of volunteers, with flying flags and bands of music, marched
through our streets in Boston, on the way to the front. Crowds of
stay-at-homes, throngs of women and children lined the sidewalks,
shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired by the marching
soldiers, with guns on their shoulders, and the strains of martial
music, varied with the then popular "The girl I left behind me," or,
"When this cruel war is over." But this is quite different. There are
no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands of music. It is the
rising up of a Nation as one man--all classes shoulder to shoulder, with
but one idea--"Lift up your hearts, and long live France." I rather pity
those who have not seen it.
Since the day when war was declared, and when the Chamber of
Deputies--all party feeling forgotten--stood on its feet and listened to
Paul Deschanel's terse, remarkable speech, even here in this little
commune, whose silence is broken only by the rumbling of the trains
passing, in view of my garden, on the way to the frontier, and the
footsteps of the groups on the way to the train, I have seen sights that
have moved me as nothing I have ever met in life before has done. Day
after day I have watched the men and their families pass silently, and
an hour later have seen the women come back leading the children. One
day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet possible for me to get to
Paris. I happened to be in the station when a train was going out.
Nothing goes over the line yet but men joining their regiments. They
were packed in like sardines. There were no uniforms--just a crowd of
men--men in blouses, men in patched jackets, well-dressed men--no
distinction of class; and on the platform the women and children they
were leaving. There was no laughter, none of the gayety with which one
has so often reproached this race--but neither were there any tears. As
the crowded train began to move, bare heads were thrust out of windows,
hats were waved, and a great shout of "Vive la France" was answered by
piping children's voices, and the choked voices of women--"Vive
l'Armee"; and when the train was out of sight the women took the
children by the hand, and quietly climbed the hill.
Ever since the 4th of August all our crossroads have been guarded, all
our railway gates closed, and also guarded--guarded by men whose only
sign of being soldiers is a cap and a gun, men in blouses with a
mobilization badge on their left arms, often in patched trousers and
sabots, with stern faces and determined eyes, and one thought--"The
country is in danger."
There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the valley on
either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route nationale from
Couilly to Meaux, arid is called "La Demi-Lune"--why "Half-Moon" I
don't know. It was there, on the 6th, that I saw, for the first time,
an armed barricade. The gate at the railway crossing had been opened to
let a cart pass, when an automobile dashed through Saint-Germain, which
is on the other side of the track. The guard raised his bayonet in the
air, to command the car to stop and show its papers, but it flew by him
and dashed up the hill. The poor guard--it was his first experience of
that sort--stood staring after the car; but the idea that he ought to
fire at it did not occur to him until it was too late. By the time it
occurred to him, and he could telephone to the Demi-Lune, it had passed
that guard in the same way--and disappeared. It did not pass Meaux. It
simply disappeared. It is still known as the "Phantom Car." Within half
an hour there was a barricade at the Demi-Lune mounted by armed men--too
late, of course. However, it was not really fruitless,--that
barricade,--as the very next day they caught three Germans there,
disguised as Sisters of Charity--papers all in order--and who would have
got by, after they were detected by a little boy's calling attention to
their ungloved hands, if it had not been for the number of armed old men
on the barricade.
What makes things especially serious here, so near the frontier, and
where the military movements must be made, is the presence of so many
Germans, and the bitter feeling there is against them. On the night of
August 2, just when the troops were beginning to move east, an attempt
was made to blow up the railroad bridge at lie de Villenoy, between here
and Meaux. The three Germans were caught with the dynamite on them--so
the story goes--and are now in the barracks at Meaux. But the most
absolute secrecy is preserved about all such things. Not only is all
France under martial law: the censorship of the press is absolute.
Every one has to carry his papers, and be provided with a passport for
which he is liable to be asked in simply crossing a road.
Meaux is full of Germans. The biggest department shop there is a German
enterprise. Even Couilly has a German or two, and we had one in our
little hamlet. But they've got to get out. Our case is rather
pathetic. He was a nice chap, employed in a big fur house in Paris. He
came to France when he was fifteen, has never been back, consequently
has never done his military service there. Oddly enough, for some
reason, he never took out his naturalization papers, so never did his
service here. He has no relatives in Germany--that is to say, none with
whom he has kept up any correspondence, he says. He earns a good salary,
and has always been one of the most generous men in the commune, but
circumstances are against him. Even though he is an intimate friend of
our mayor, the commune preferred to be rid of him. He begged not to be
sent back to Germany, so he went sadly enough to a concentration camp,
pretty well convinced that his career here was over. Still, the French
do forget easily.
Couilly had two Germans. One of them--the barber--got out quick. The
other did not. But he was quietly informed by some of his
neighbors--with pistols in their hands--that his room was better than
his company.
The barber occupied a shop in the one principal street in the village,
which is, by the way, a comparatively rich place. He had a front shop,
which was a cafe, with a well-fitted-up bar. The back, with a
well-dressed window on the street, full of toilette articles, was the
barber and hairdressing-room, very neatly arranged, with modern set
bowls and mirrors, cabinets full of towels, well-filled shelves of all
the things that make such a place profitable. You should see it now.
Its broken windows and doors stand open to the weather. The entire
interior has been "efficiently" wrecked. It is as systematic a work of
destruction as I have ever seen. Not a thing was stolen, but not an
article was spared. All the bottles full of things to drink and all the
glasses to drink out of are smashed, so are counters, tables, chairs,
and shelving. In the barber shop there is a litter of broken porcelain,
broken combs, and smashed-up chairs and boxes among a wreck of hair
dyes, perfumes, brillantine, and torn towels, and an odor of aperitifs
and cologne over it all.
Every one pretends not to know when it happened. They say, "It was
found like that one morning." Every one goes to look at it--no one
enters, no one touches anything. They simply say with a smile of scorn,
"Good--and so well done."
There are so many things that I wish you could see. They would give you
such a new point of view regarding this race--traditionally so gay, so
indifferent to many things that you consider moral, so fond of their
individual comfort and personal pleasure, and often so rebellious to
discipline. You would be surprised--surprised at their unity, surprised
at their seriousness, and often touched by their philosophical
acceptance of it all.
Amelie has a stepson and daughter. The boy--named Marius--like his
father plays the violin. Like many humble musicians his music is his
life and he adds handsomely to his salary as a clerk by playing at
dances and little concerts, and by giving lessons in the evening. Like
his father he is very timid. But he accepted the war without a word,
though nothing is more foreign to his nature. It brought it home to
me--this rising up of a Nation in self-defense. It is not the marching
into battle of an army that has chosen soldiering. It is the marching
out of all the people--of every temperament--the rich, the poor, the
timid and the bold, the sensitive and the hardened, the ignorant and the
scholar--all men, because they happen to be males, called on not only to
cry, "Vive la France," but to see to it that she does live if dying for
her can keep her alive. It is a compelling idea, isn't it?
Amelie's stepdaughter is married to a big burly chap by the name of
Georges Godot. He is a thick-necked, red-faced man--in the dynamite
corps on the railroad, the construction department. He is used to
hardships. War is as good as anything else to him. When he came to say
"good-bye" he said, "Well, if I have the luck to come back--so much the
better. If I don't, that will be all right. You can put a placque down
below in the cemetery with 'Godot, Georges: Died for the country '; and
when my boys grow up they can say to their comrades, 'Papa, you know, he
died on the battlefield.' It will be a sort of distinction I am not
likely to earn for them any other way"; and off he went. Rather fine
for a man of that class.
Even the women make no cry. As for the children--even when you would
think that they were old enough to understand the meaning of these
partings they make no sign, though they seem to understand all the rest
of it well enough. There isn't a boy of eight in our commune who cannot
tell you how it all came about, and who is not just now full of stories
of 1870, which he has heard from grandma and grandpa, for, as is
natural, every one talks of 1870 now. I have lived among these people,
loved them and believed in them, even when their politics annoyed me,
but I confess that they have given me a surprise.