VERDUN
Night was the same as day in the tunnels; the electric light was always
on, and with the morning no daylight crept in to alter it. The orderly
called her at half-past six and she took her "clients" to a barracks in
the suburbs of Verdun, where Russian prisoners "liberated" from Germany
crowded and jostled to see her from behind the bars of the barrack
square, like wild animals in a cage. Armed sentries paced backwards and
forwards across the gateway to the yard. As it came on to snow a French
soldier came out of a guardroom and invited her in by the fire.
Inside, the rest of the guard huddled about the stove, and behind them a
Russian prisoner with a moon face swept up the crumbs from their last meal.
"Why do Americans guard the gate?" she asked, "since you are a French
guard?"
"Because we don't shoot with enough goodwill," grinned a little man.
"But who do you want to shoot?"
"Those fellows!" said the little man, slapping the moon-faced Russian on
the thigh. "We used to guard the gates a week ago. But the Russians were
always escaping, and not enough were shot as they got over the wall. So
they said: 'The Americans are the types for that!' and they put them on
to guard the gates. Look outside! You are having a success,
mademoiselle!"
Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor,
scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at
Fanny in silence through the open doorway.
"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they
were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the
Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look
after these pigs!"
A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to
the doctor," he said sharply.
"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the
sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the
bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.
"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, _va-t'en_!" they all said,
and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned
towards the door.
"Here, dress yourself!"
"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and
disappeared, buckling it on.
"You have Russians in cells, too?"
"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on
bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."
"But why won't they work?"
"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they
are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian,
and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all
useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are
in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."
An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
French.
"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly.
"I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step
across ... it isn't a stone's throw."
She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and
rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for
they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes,
and one sardine a man.
After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him
out of the hut.
"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so
we thought you'd better come and have some chips."
"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to
turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a
shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling
kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought
Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she
was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her
a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat
them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with
coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only
that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French
that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had
finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what
remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of
animals, they said:
"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or
they'd sure die."
"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't
get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
"We wouldn't stand it."
"You have no idea of poverty."
Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a
hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the
Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet
here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry,
though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality
they were....
She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man
standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish
accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a
souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."
"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"
"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
Just as though you were a zebra."
"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of
silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other
barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps
of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_
for lunch.
At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in
search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows,
invisible from the main roads.
And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to
evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many
thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them,
and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with
the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once
he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you
and interest me?"
She looked round.
"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is
jealous of you."
She did not know what to make of this.
"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the
_citadelle_."
"But...."
"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does,
as _his woman_."
"But, why...."
"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman
for miles around, and you belong to us!"
"You too?"
"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger
because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great
curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"
"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
"We talk of this and that."
That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.
"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
"Oh, but that's not necessary ... mystery!"
"It _is_ necessary to love."
"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much,
"does not believe that you can love what you know."
The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory
image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This
poor lady will soon be used to everything."
Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.
"When do we go back?" she asked absently.
The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that,
and he smiled again.
They left next day, after the midday meal.
Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching
corridors.
"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."
She waited.
"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."
Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:
"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."
"Let me pass...." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely
ashamed of her refusal.
* * * * *
"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you
satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
"My experience?"
"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now,
if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town
where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends
again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
"No?"
"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead
violence of the plains--between trenches that wandered down from the
side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion
upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the
semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and
cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on
the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the
road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled
with instruments. Depôt after depôt was piled between the trees and the
notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them.
"The drinking trough--the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no
horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the...." but they
flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued
them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not
smoke here ... _Nicht rauchen_," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "_Rauchen streng
verboten_," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood
chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made
them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as
it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of
camouflage--small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with
wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the
moon--long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing
undergrowth--and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its
knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of
the earth.
When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out
upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare.
Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse
villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow
grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across
village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure
toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer
a lift?"
Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a
murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom
she had overtaken.
"Where are you going?"
"To Briey."
"We, too. Get in, madame."
The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing,
climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her
her basket and umbrella.
"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her
a rug.
"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature
against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."
"You are not afraid?"
"Oh, no!"
"Cover yourself well, well."
Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road,
who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace
they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word,
though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears
until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!"
they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own
doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing
themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop...."
They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the
sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the
Frenchman indicated.
The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her
handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out
backwards, with feet feeling for the ground--"What do I owe you,
mademoiselle?"
"Ah, nothing, nothing."
"_Mais si_! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny
piece on the seat, she hurried away.
Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny
ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said,
"remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of
life is spoilt for you."
"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.
Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the
foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just
above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the
moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed
slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.
* * * * *
An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the
window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who
prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fräulein," said Fanny, "would it
matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry
it afterwards."
What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had
nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room
overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night
full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the
smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.
When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open
the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow
and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out
ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little
boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed.
The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again,
between the grey walls of her bath--so like her cradle and her
coffin--she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.
"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to
travel is not to move across the earth."
Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten
words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:
"The strange things of travel,
The East and the West,
The hill beyond the hill--"
But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her
through the door.
"You are well, Fräulein?"
Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
I was ill?"
"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we
had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have
just remembered her."
"Well, I won't drown myself."
"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."
"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.
"What?"
"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon
the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to
drown myself."