“What's become of those people?”
This was his story:
When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years
old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not
pity the old woman very much because she had money; they knew it.
She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the
village, on the edge of the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of
the same strain as the men folk--a hardy old woman, tall and thin, who
seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The women of the
fields laugh but little in any case, that is men's business. But they
themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy, gloomy
life. The peasants imbibe a little noisy merriment at the tavern, but
their helpmates always have grave, stern countenances. The muscles of
their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.
Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which
was soon covered by the snows. She came to the village once a week to
get bread and a little meat. Then she returned to her house. As there
was talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her shoulder--her son's
gun, rusty and with the butt worn by the rubbing of the hand--and she
was a strange sight, the tall “Sauvage,” a little bent, going with slow
strides over the snow, the muzzle of the piece extending beyond the
black headdress, which confined her head and imprisoned her white hair,
which no one had ever seen.
One day a Prussian force arrived. It was billeted upon the inhabitants,
according to the property and resources of each. Four were allotted to
the old woman, who was known to be rich.
They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and
blue eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they
had endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had
remained kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they showed
themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could,
all expense and fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making
their toilet at the well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn,
splashing with great swishes of water their pink-white northern skin,
while La Mere Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup. They would
be seen cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling
potatoes, doing up all the housework like four good sons around their
mother.
But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with
his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made
a roll of black hair upon his lip. She asked every day of each of the
soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: “Do you know where the
French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it.”
They invariably answered, “No, we don't know, don't know a thing at
all.” And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness--they who had
mothers, too, there at home--they rendered her a thousand little
services. She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the
peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class
alone. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and
because every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in
masses, who make the true cannon's prey because they are so many; those,
in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of war because
they are the feeblest and offer least resistance--they hardly understand
at all those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those
pretended political combinations which in six months exhaust two
nations, the conqueror with the conquered.
They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere
Sauvage:
“There are four who have found a soft place.”
Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she
observed, far off on the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling. Soon
she recognized him; it was the postman to distribute the letters. He
gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case the spectacles
which she used for sewing. Then she read:
MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you sad news. Your boy
Victor was killed yesterday by a shell which almost cut him in two.
I was near by, as we stood next each other in the company, and he
told me about you and asked me to let you know on the same day if
anything happened to him.
I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you
when the war is done.
CESAIRE RIVOT,
Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.
The letter was dated three weeks back.
She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and
stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet. She thought: “There's
Victor killed now.” Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and
the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful,
torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never
again! The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed
the son. He had been cut in two by a cannon-ball. She seemed to see the
thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he
chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments of
anger.
What had they done with his body afterward? If they had only let her
have her boy back as they had brought back her husband--with the bullet
in the middle of the forehead!
But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the
village. She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received
them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.
They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a
fine rabbit--stolen, doubtless--and they made signs to the old woman
that there was to be something good to east.
She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came
to killing the rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was not the
first. One of the soldiers struck it down with a blow of his fist behind
the ears.
The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the
blood which she was touching, and which covered her hands, and which she
felt cooling and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot,
and she kept seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody, like this still
palpitating animal.
She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not
even a mouthful. They devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves
about her. She looked at them sideways, without speaking, her face so
impassive that they perceived nothing.
All of a sudden she said: “I don't even know your names, and here's
a whole month that we've been together.” They understood, not without
difficulty, what she wanted, and told their names.
That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with
the addresses of their families, and, resting her spectacles on her
great nose, she contemplated that strange handwriting, then folded the
sheet and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told her of
the death of her son.
When the meal was ended she said to the men:
“I am going to work for you.”
And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.
They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to
them that thus they would not be so cold; and they helped her. They
heaped the stacks of hay as high as the straw roof, and in that manner
they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder, warm and
perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.
At dinner one of them was worried to see that La Mere Sauvage still
ate nothing. She told him that she had pains in her stomach. Then she
kindled a good fire to warm herself, and the four Germans ascended to
their lodging-place by the ladder which served them every night for this
purpose.
As soon as they closed the trapdoor the old woman removed the ladder,
then opened the outside door noiselessly and went back to look for more
bundles of straw, with which she filled her kitchen. She went barefoot
in the snow, so softly that no sound was heard. From time to time she
listened to the sonorous and unequal snoring of the four soldiers who
were fast asleep.
When she judged her preparations to be sufficient, she threw one of the
bundles into the fireplace, and when it was alight she scattered it over
all the others. Then she went outside again and looked.
In a few seconds the whole interior of the cottage was illumined with
a brilliant light and became a frightful brasier, a gigantic fiery
furnace, whose glare streamed out of the narrow window and threw a
glittering beam upon the snow.
Then a great cry issued from the top of the house; it was a clamor of
men shouting heartrending calls of anguish and of terror. Finally the
trapdoor having given way, a whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft,
pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like the immense flame of a
torch, and all the cottage flared.
Nothing more was heard therein but the crackling of the fire, the
cracking of the walls, the falling of the rafters. Suddenly the roof
fell in and the burning carcass of the dwelling hurled a great plume of
sparks into the air, amid a cloud of smoke.
The country, all white, lit up by the fire, shone like a cloth of silver
tinted with red.
A bell, far off, began to toll.
The old “Sauvage” stood before her ruined dwelling, armed with her gun,
her son's gun, for fear one of those men might escape.
When she saw that it was ended, she threw her weapon into the brasier. A
loud report followed.
People were coming, the peasants, the Prussians.
They found the woman seated on the trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.
A German officer, but speaking French like a son of France, demanded:
“Where are your soldiers?”
She reached her bony arm toward the red heap of fire which was almost
out and answered with a strong voice:
“There!”
They crowded round her. The Prussian asked:
“How did it take fire?”
“It was I who set it on fire.”
They did not believe her, they thought that the sudden disaster had made
her crazy. While all pressed round and listened, she told the story from
beginning to end, from the arrival of the letter to the last shriek of
the men who were burned with her house, and never omitted a detail.
When she had finished, she drew two pieces of paper from her pocket,
and, in order to distinguish them by the last gleams of the fire, she
again adjusted her spectacles. Then she said, showing one:
“That, that is the death of Victor.” Showing the other, she added,
indicating the red ruins with a bend of the head: “Here are their names,
so that you can write home.” She quietly held a sheet of paper out to
the officer, who held her by the shoulders, and she continued:
“You must write how it happened, and you must say to their mothers that
it was I who did that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage! Do not forget.”
The officer shouted some orders in German. They seized her, they threw
her against the walls of her house, still hot. Then twelve men drew
quickly up before her, at twenty paces. She did not move. She had
understood; she waited.
An order rang out, followed instantly by a long report. A belated shot
went off by itself, after the others.
The old woman did not fall. She sank as though they had cut off her
legs.
The Prussian officer approached. She was almost cut in two, and in her
withered hand she held her letter bathed with blood.
My friend Serval added:
“It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the chateau of the
district, which belonged to me.”
I thought of the mothers of those four fine fellows burned in that house
and of the horrible heroism of that other mother shot against the wall.
And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the flames.