On the Edge of the War Zone Part 2

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 cure at St. Honore 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, Sat.u.r.day, 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.

IlI

October 2, 1914

Well, Amelie came back yesterday, and I can tell you it was a busy day. I a.s.sure you that I was glad to see her about the house again. I liked doing the work well enough,--for a little while. But I had quite all I wanted of it before the fortnight was over. I felt like "giving praise" when I saw her coming into the garden, looking just as good as new, and, my word for it, she made things hum yesterday.

The first thing she did, after the house was in order, and lunch out of the way, was to open up the cave in which she had stored her household treasures a month ago, and I pa.s.sed a rare afternoon. I spent a good part of it getting behind something to conceal my silent laughter. If you had been here you would have enjoyed it--and her.

I knew something was as it should not be when I saw her pus.h.i.+ng the little wheelbarrow on which were all my waste-baskets--I have needed them. But when I got them back, it about finished my attempts at sobriety. I told her to put them on the dining-room table and I would unpack them and put the contents in place. But before that was done, I had to listen to her "tale of woe."

She had hidden practically everything--clocks, bed and table linen, all her mattresses, except the ones she and Pere slept on, practically all their clothes, except what they had on their backs and one change. I had not given it much thought, though I do remember her saying, when the subterranean pa.s.sage was sealed up: "Let the Boches come! They'll find mighty little in my house."

Well--the clocks are rusted. They are soaking in kerosene now, and I imagine it is little good that will do them. All her linen is damp and smelly, and much of it is mildewed. As for the blankets and flannels-- ough!

I felt sympathetic, and tried to appear so. But I was in the condition of "L'homme qui rit." The smallest effort to express an emotion tended to make me grimace horribly. She was so funny. I was glad when she finished saying naughty words about herself, and declaring that "Madame was right not to upset her house," and that the next time the Boches thought of coming here they would be welcome to anything she had. "For," she ended, "I'll never get myself into this sort of a mess again, my word of honor!" And she marched out of the house, carrying the bottle of eau de Javelle with her. The whole hamlet smells of it this minute.

I had a small-sized fit of hysterics after she had gone, and it was not cured by opening up my waste-baskets and laying out the "treasures"

she had saved for me. I laughed until I cried.

There were my bouillion cups, and no saucers. The saucers were piled in the buffet. There were half-a-dozen decorated plates which had stood on end in the buffet,--just as color notes--no value at all.

There were bits of silver, and nearly all the plated stuff. There was an old painted fan, several strings of beads, a rosary which hung on a nail at the head of my bed, a few bits of jewelry--you know how little I care for jewelry,--and there were four bra.s.s candlesticks.

The only things I had missed at all were the plated things. I had not had teaspoons enough when the English were here--not that they cared. They were quite willing to stir their tea with each other's spoons, since there was plenty of tea,--and a "stick" went with it.

You cannot deny that it had its funny side.

I could not help asking myself, even while I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes, if most of the people I saw flying four weeks ago might not have found themselves in the same fix when it came to taking stock of what was saved and what was lost.

I remember so well being at Aix-les-Bains, in 1899, when the Hotel du Beau-Site was burned, and finding a woman in a wrapper sitting on a bench in the park in front of the burning hotel, with the lace waist of an evening frock in one hand, and a small bottle of alcohol in the other. She explained to me, with some emotion, that she had gone back, at the risk of her life, to get the bottle from her dressing-table, "for fear that it would explode!"

It did not take me half an hour to get my effects in order, but poor Amelie's disgust seems to increase with time. You can't deny that if I had been drummed out and came back to find my house a ruin, my books and pictures destroyed, and only those worthless bits of china and plated ware to "start housekeeping again," it would have been humorous. Real humor is only exaggeration. That would surely have been a colossal exaggeration.

It is not the first time I have had to ask myself, seriously, "Why this mania for possession?" The ferryman on the Styx is as likely to take it across as our railroad is to "handle" it today. Yet nothing seems able to break a person born with that mania for collecting.

I stood looking round at it all when everything was in place, and I realized that if the disaster had come, I should have found it easy to reconcile myself to it in an epoch where millions were facing it with me. It is the law of Nature. Material things, like the friends we have lost, may be eternally regretted. They cannot be eternally grieved for.

We must "--be up and doing, With a heart for any fate."

All the same, it was a queer twist in the order of my life, that, hunting in all directions for a quiet retreat in which to rest my weary spirit, I should have ended by deliberately sitting myself down on the edge of a battlefield,--even though it was on the safe edge,--and stranger still, that there I forgot that my spirit was weary.

We are beginning to pick up all sorts of odd little tales of the adventures of some of the people who had remained at Voisin. One old man there, a mason, who had worked on my house, had a very queer experience. Like all the rest of them, he went on working in the fields all through the menacing days. I can't make out whether he had no realization of actual danger, or whether that was his way of meeting it. Anyway, he disappeared on the morning the battle began, September 5, and did not return for several days. His old wife had made up her mind that the Germans had got him, when one morning he turned up, tired, pale, and hungry, and not in any state to explain his absence.

It was some days before his wife could get the story out of him. He owns a field about halfway between Voisins and Mareuil, close to the route de Pave du Roi, and on the morning that the battle began he was digging potatoes there. Suddenly he saw a small group of hors.e.m.e.n riding down from the ca.n.a.l, and by their spiked helmets he knew them for Germans.

His first idea, naturally, was to escape. He dropped his hoe, but he was too paralyzed with fear to run, and there was nothing to hide behind. So he began walking across the field as well as his trembling old legs would let him, with his hands in his pockets.

Of course the Uhlans overtook him in a few minutes, and called out to him, in French, to stop. He stopped at once, expecting to be shot instantly.

They ordered him to come out into the road. He managed to obey. By the time he got there terror had made him quite speechless.

They began to question him. To all their questions he merely shook his head. He understood well enough, but his tongue refused its office, and by the time he could speak the idea had come to him to pretend that he was not French--that he was a refugee--that he did not know the country,--was lost,--in fact, that he did not know anything. He managed to carry it off, and finally they gave him up as a bad job, and rode away up the hill towards my house.

Then he had a new panic. He did not dare go home. He was afraid he would find them in the village, and that they would find out he had lied and harm his old wife, or perhaps destroy the town. So he had hidden down by the ca.n.a.l until hunger drove him home. It is a simple tale, but it was a rude experience for the old man, who has not got over it yet.

I am afraid all this seems trivial to you, coming out of the midst of this terrible war. But it is actually our life here. We listen to the cannon in ignorance of what is happening. Where would be the sense of my writing you that the battle-front has settled down to uncomfortable trench work on the Aisne; that Manoury is holding the line in front of us from Compiegne to Soissons, with Castelnau to the north of him, with his left wing resting on the Somme; that Maud'huy was behind Albert; and that Rheims cathedral had been persistently and brutally sh.e.l.led since September 18? We only get news of that sort intermittently. Our railroad is in the hands of the Minister of War, and every day or two our communications are cut off, from military necessity. You know, I am sure, more about all this than we do, with your cable men filling the newspapers.

But if I am seeing none of that, I am seeing the spirit of these people, so sure of success in the end, and so convinced that, even if it takes the whole world to do it, they will yet see the Hohenzollern dynasty go up in the smoke of the conflagration it has lighted.

Of course, the vicious destruction of the great cathedral sends s.h.i.+vers down my back. Every time I hear the big guns in that direction I think of the last time we were there. Do you remember how we sat, in the twilight of a rainy day, in our top-floor room, at the Lion d'Or, in the wide window-seat, which brought us just at a level with that dear tympanum, with its primitive stone carving of David and Goliath, and all those wonderful animals sitting up so bravely on the lacework of the parapet? Such a wave of pity goes over me when I think that not only is it destroyed, but that future generations are deprived of seeing it; that one of the greatest achievements of the hands of man, a work which has withstood so many wars in what we called "savage times,"

before any claims were made for "Kultur," should have been destroyed in our days. Men have come and men have gone (apologies to Tennyson)--it is the law of living. But the wilful, unnecessary destruction of the great works of man, the testimony which one age has left as a heritage to all time--for that loss neither Man nor Time has any consolation. It is a theft from future ages, and for it Germany will merit the hatred of the world through the coming generations.

IV