FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I

Sermaize, however, was not to be the scene of my future labours. The honour was reserved for Bar-le-Duc, the captital city of the Meuse, the seat of a Prefecture, and proud manufacturer of a very special jam, "Confitures de Bar-le-Duc." The mouth waters at the very thought of it, but desire develops a limp when you have seen the initial processes of manufacture; for these consist in the removal by means of a finely-cut quill of every pip from every currant about to be boiled in the sacrificial pan. As you go through the streets in July you see white and crimson patches on the ground. They look disgustingly like something that has been chewed and spumed forth again. They are the discarded currant pips, for only the skin and pulp are made into jam.

This unpipping (have we any adequate translation for Épepiner?), paid for at the rate of about four sous a pound, is sometimes carried on under the cleanliest of home conditions, but occasionally one sees a group of women at work round a table that makes jam for the moment the least appetising of comestibles. Nevertheless, if the good God ever places a pot of Confiture de Bar-le-Duc upon your table, eat it; eat it À la Russe with a spoon—don't insult it with bread—and you will become a god with nectar on your lips.

There were about four thousand refugees in Bar. That is why I was there too. And before I had been ten minutes in the town a hard-voiced woman said, "Would you please carry those seaux hygiÉniques (sanitary pails) upstairs?" So much for my anticipatory thrills. If I ever go to heaven I shall be put in the back garden.

À la guerre, comme À la guerre. I carried the pails—a work of supererogation as it subsequently transpired, for they all had to be brought down again promptly, so heavily were they in demand.

For the sanitation of Bar-le-Duc has yet to be born.[2] One can't call arrangements that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sanitation, one can only call them self-advertisement. Until I went to Bar I never knew that the air could be solid with smell. One might as well walk up a sewer as up the Rue de l'Horloge on a hot day. Every man, woman and child in the town ought to have died of diphtheria, typhoid, septic poisoning, of a dozen gruesome diseases long ago. If smells could kill, Bar would be as depopulated as the Dead Cities of the Zuyder Zee. But the French seem to thrive on smells, though in all fairness I must admit that once or twice a grumble reached me. But that was when the cesspool under the window was discharging its contents into the yard.

The hard-voiced woman was hygienically mad. She imported a Sanitary Inspector, an ironic anomaly, who used to blush apoplectically through meals because she would discuss the undiscussable with him. "I hope you are not squeamish? We don't mind these things here," she said to me. "It is so stupid to be a prude."

Frankly, I could have slain that woman. She wasn't fit to live. The climax came on a broiling day when we were all exhausted and not a little sick from heat and smell. She pleasingly entertained us at dinner with a graphic description of a tubercular hip which she had been dressing. There was a manure heap outside the window of the sick child's room. It crawled with flies. So did the room. So did the hip.

She went back to the native sphere she should never have left a few days later, but in the meantime she had obsessed us all with a firm belief in the value of the seau hygiÉnique. Every refugee family should have one. Our first care must be to provide it. The obsession drove us into strange difficulties, as, for example, once in a neighbouring village where, trusting to my companion to keep the kindly but inquisitive CurÉ who accompanied us too deeply engaged in conversation to hear what I was saying, I asked the mother of a large family if she would like us to give her one.

"Qu'est que c'est? What did you say?"

Gentle as my murmur had been, M. le CurÉ was down on me like a shot. The woman who hesitates is lost. Anything is better than embarrassment. I repeated the question.

"Ce n'est pas nÉcessaire. Il y a un jardin," was his electrifying reply, and we filed out after him, with new ideas on French social questions simmering in our heads.

More embarrassing still, though, was a visit to a dear old couple living high up in a small room in a narrow foetid street. Madame Legrand was a dear, with a round chubby face and the brightest of blue eyes, a complexion like a rosy apple and dimples like a girl's. She wore a spotlessly white mob-cap with a coquettish little frill round it, and she was just as clean and as fresh and as sonsy as if she had stepped out of her little cottage to go to Mass. Her husband was a rather picturesque creature, with a crimson cummerbund round his waist. He had been a garde-forÊt, and together they had saved and scraped, living frugally and decently, putting money by every year until at last they were able to buy a cottage and an acre or two of land. Then the war came and the Germans, and the cottage was burnt, and the poor old things fled to Bar-le-Duc, homeless and beggared, possessed of nothing in all the world but just the clothes on their backs.

The garde-forÊt was talking to my companion. I broached the all-important subject to Madame.

"Vous avez un seau hygiÉnique?" (I admit it was vilely put.)

"Mais oui, Mademoiselle. Voulez-vous ...?" Before I could stop her she had flourished it out upon the floor. It seems there are no limits to French hospitality, but there are to what even a commonplace English woman can face with stoical calm. Lest worse befall we fled. Somehow our sanitary researches lacked enthusiasm after that.

II

"Bar-le-Duc, an ancient and historical city of the Meuse, is beautifully situated on the banks of the Ornain."

That, of course, is how I should have commenced Chapter III, and then, with Baedekered solemnity, have described its streets, its canals, its railway-station—a dull affair until a bomb blew its glass roof to fragments; when it became quaintly skeletonic—its woods and hills, its churches and its monuments.

Only I never do anything quite as I ought to, and my capacity for getting into mischief is unlimited. I can't bear the level highways of Life, cut like a Route Nationale straight from point to point, white, steam-rollered, respectable, horrible. For me the by-ways and the lanes, the hedges smelling of wild roses and woodbine, or a-fire with berry and burning leaf, the cross-cuts leading you know not whither, but delightfully sure to surprise you in the end. What if the surprise is sometimes in a bog, in the mire, or in a thicket of furze? More often than not it is in Fairyland.

And so grant me your indulgence if I wander a little, loitering in the green meadows, plunging through the dim woods of experience. Especially as I am going to be good now and explain Bar and the refugees.

As I told you, there were some four thousand of them, from the Argonne, the Ardennes, Luxembourg, and many a frontier village such as Longuyon or Longwy. And Bar received them coldly. It dubbed them, without distinction of person, "ces sales ÉmigrÉs," forgetting that the dirt and squalor of their appearance was due to adversity and not to any fault of their own. Forgetting, too, that it had very nearly been ÉmigrÉ itself. For the Germans came within five miles of it. From the town shells could be seen bursting high up the valley; the blaze of burning villages reddened the evening sky. Trains poured out laden with terrified inhabitants fearing the worst, all the hospitals were evacuated, and down the roads from the battle, from Mussey, from Vassincourt, from Laimont and RÉvigny came the wounded, a long procession of maimed and broken men. They lay in the streets, on door-steps, in the station-yard, they fell, dying, by canal and river bank. Kindly women, thrusting their own fear aside, ministered to them, the cannon thundering at their very door. And with the wounded came the refugees. What a procession that must have been. Women have told me of it. Told me how, after days—even weeks—of semi-starvation, lying in the open at night, exposed to rain and sun, often unable to get even a drink of water (for to their eternal shame many a village locked its wells, refusing to open them even for parched and wailing children), they found themselves caught in the backwash of the battle. To all the other horrors of flight was added this. Men, it might be their own sons, or husbands, or brothers, blood-stained remnants of humanity plodding wearily, desperately down the road, while in the fields and in the ditches lay mangled, encarnadined things that the very sun itself must have shuddered to look upon. Old feeble men and women fell out and died by the way, a mother carried her dead baby for three nights and three days, for there was no one to bury it, and the God of Life robed himself in the trappings of Death as he gathered exhausted mother and new-born babe in his arms.

And so they came to Bar. In the big dormitories of the Caserne Oudinot straw was laid on the floor, and there they were lodged, some after a night's rest to set wearily forth again, others to remain in the town, for the tide had turned and the Germans were in retreat.

There must have been an unusually large number of houses to let in Bar before the war; many, we know, had been condemned by the authorities, and, truth to tell, I don't wonder at it. "House to let" did not imply, as you might suppose, that it was untenanted, especially if the house was in the rue des Grangettes, or rue Oudinot, rue de VÉel, or rue de l'Horloge. The tenants paid no rent. They had been in possession for years, possibly centuries. They were as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, and they had all the Élan, the joie de vivre, the vivacity and the tactical genius of the French nation. They welcomed the unhappy refugees—I was going to say vociferously, remembering the soldier who, billeted in a Kerry village, complained that the fleas sat up and barked at him.

The rooms, though dirty, unsanitary and swarming with the terror that hoppeth in the noonday (there were other and even worse plagues as well), were a shelter. The war would be over in three months, and one would be going home again. In the meantime one could endure the palliasse (a great sack filled with straw and laid on the floor, and on which four, five, seven or even more people slept at night), one could cower under the single blanket provided by the town, not undressing, of course; that would be to perish. One could learn to share the narrowest of quarters with nine, eleven, even fifteen other people; one could tighten one's belt when hunger came—and it came very often during those first hard months—but one could not endure the hostile looks of the tradespeople, and the sales ÉmigrÉs spit at one in the streets.

The refugees, however, had one good friend; monsieur C., an ex-mayor of the town and a man whose "heart was open as day to melting charity," made their cause his own. And perhaps because of him, perhaps out of its own good heart, the town, officially considered, did its best for them. It gave them clean straw for their palliasses; it saw that no room was without a stove; it established a market for them when it discovered that the shopkeepers, exploiting misery, were scandalously overcharging for their goods; it declined to take rent from mothers with young families; and it appointed a doctor who gave medical attention free.

All very good and helpful, but mere drops in the bucket of refugee needs. You see the war had caught them unawares, and at first, no doubt for wise military reasons, the authorities discouraged flight. People who might have packed up necessaries and escaped in good order found themselves driven like cattle through the country, the Germans at their heels, the smallest of bundles clutched under their arms, and the gendarmes shouting "VÎte, VÎte, DepÊchez-vous, depÊchez-vous," till reason itself trembled in the balance.

Some, too, had remembered the war of Soixante-Dix, when the Prussians, marching to victory, treated the civilians kindly. "They passed through our village laughing and singing songs," old women have told me. Some atrocities there were, even then; but, compared with those of the present war, only the spasmodic outbursts of boyhood in a rage.

Consequently, flight was often delayed till the last moment, delayed till it was too late, and, caught by the tide, some found themselves prisoners behind the lines. Those who got away saved practically nothing. Sometimes a few family papers, sometimes the bas de laine, the storehouse of their savings, sometimes a change of linen, most often nothing at all.

"Mais rien, Mademoiselle. Je vous assure, rien du tout, du tout, du tout. Pas Ça," and with the familiar gesture a forefinger nail would catch behind a front tooth and then click sharply outwards. When talking to an excited Meusienne, it is well to be wary. One must not stand too near, for she is sure to thrust her face close to your own, and when the finger flies out it no longer answers to the helm. It may end its unbridled career anywhere, and commit awful havoc in the ending, for the nail of the Meusienne is not a nail, it is a talon.

No wonder the poor souls needed help. No wonder they besieged our door when the news went forth that "Les Anglaises" had come to town and were distributing clothes and utensils, chairs, garde-mangers (small safes in which to keep their food, the fly pest being sheerly horrible), sheets, blankets—anything and everything that destitute humanity needs and is grateful for. Their faith in us, after a few months of work, became profound. They believed we could evolve anything, anywhere and at a moment's notice. If stern necessity obliged us to refuse, they had a touching way of saying, "Eh bien, ce sera pour une autre fois"[3]—a politeness which extricated them gracefully from a difficult position, but left us struggling in the net of circumstance and unaccountably convinced that when they called again "our purse, our person, our extremest means would lie all unlocked to their occasion."

III

But these little amenities of relief only thrust themselves upon me by degrees. At first, during the torrid summer weeks, everything was so new and so strange there were no clean-cut outlines at all. Before one impression had focused itself upon the mind another was claiming place. My brain—if you could have examined it—must have looked like a photographic plate exposed some dozens of times by a careless amateur. From the general mistiness and blur only a few things stand out. The stifling heat, the awful smells, the unending succession of weeping and hysterical women, and last, but not least, les puces.

Did you ever hear the story of the Irish farmer who said he "did not grudge them their bite and their sup, but what he could not stand was the continule thramping"? Well, the thramping was maddening. I believe I never paid a visit to a refugee in those days without becoming the exercising ground for light cavalry. People sitting quietly in our Common-room working at case-papers would suddenly dash away, to come back some minutes later in rage and exasperation. The cavalry still manoeuvred. A mere patrol of two or three could be dealt with, but the poor wretch who had a regiment nearly qualified for a lunatic asylum.

Every visit we paid renewed our afflictions, and the houses, old and long untenanted, being so disgustingly dirty, we endured mental agonies—in addition to physical ones—when we thought of the filth from which the plague had come. Oddly enough, we did not suffer so much the next summer, and we were mercifully spared the attentions of other less active but even more horrible forms of entomological life.

You see, it was a rule—and as experience proved a very wise rule—of our Society that no help should be given unless the applicant had been visited and full particulars of his, or her, condition ascertained. Roughly speaking, we found out where he had come from, his previous occupation and station in life, the size of his farm if he had one and the amount of his stock, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, rabbits, etc.; we made notes on his housing conditions, tabulated the members of his family, their ages and sex, their present employment and the amount of wages earned. All of which took time.

Armed with a notebook and pencil, we would sally forth, to grope our way up pitch-dark staircases, knock at innumerable doors, dash past the murky corner where the cesspool lay—I know houses in which it is under the stairs—and at last run the refugee to earth.

Then followed the usual routine. A chair—generally broken or minus a back—or a stool dragged forth with an apology for its poverty: "Quand on est ÉmigrÉe, vous savez, Madame—ou Mademoiselle, je ne sais pas?" and then the torrent. A word sufficed to unloose it. Only a fool would try to stem it.

"Ah, Mademoiselle, you do not know what I have suffered."

So Madame would settle herself to the tale, and that was the moment when ... when ... when doubt grew, then certainty, and "Half-a-league, half-a-league, half-a-league onward" hammered an accompaniment on the brain.

In the evening we sorted out our notes and made up our case papers. These latter should yield rich harvest to the future historian if they are preserved, and if the good God has endowed him with a sense of humour. He could make such delicious "copy" from them. For the individuality of the worker stamped itself upon the papers even more legibly than the biography of the case. There are lots of gems scattered through them, but the one I like best lies in the column headed Medical Relief, and runs as follows—

Aug. 26. Madame Guiot has pneumonia. Condition serious.

Aug. 31. Madame quite comfortable.

Sept. 2. Madame has died. (Nurse's initials appended.)

In the papers you may read that such and such a house is infested with vermin; that Mademoiselle Wurtz is said, by the neighbours, to drink; that Madame Dablainville is filthy and lives like a pig; that the life of Madame Hache falls regrettably below accepted standards of morality; and that Madame Bontemps, who probably never owned three pocket-handkerchiefs in her life, declares that she lost sixty pairs of handspun linen sheets, four dozen chemises, and pillow and bolster cases innumerable when the Germans burnt her home.

You may also read how Mademoiselle Rose Perrotin was nursing a sick father when the Boches took possession of her village; how the Commandant ordered her to leave, and how she, with tears streaming down her large fat face, begged to be allowed to remain. Her father was dying. It was impossible to leave him. But German Commandants care little for filial feelings. Mademoiselle Rose (a blossom withering on its stem) had a figure like a monolith but a heart of gold. Even though they shot her she would not go away. They did not shoot her. They quietly placed her on the outskirts of the village and bade her begone. Next day she crept back again. She prayed, she wept, she implored, she entreated. When a monolith weeps even Emperors succumb. So did the Commandant. A day, two days, passed, and then her father died. They must have been very dreadful days, but worse was to follow. No one would bury the dead Frenchman. She had to leave him lying there—I gathered, however, that a grave was subsequently dug for him in unconsecrated ground—and walk, and walk, and walk, mile after mile, kilomÉtre after kilomÉtre, longing to weep, nay, to cascade tears; but, "Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle. Ah, quelle misÈre. I had not got a pocket-handkerchief!"

That a father should die, that is Fate, but that one should not have a pocket-handkerchief!... She wept afresh because she had not been able to weep then, and I believe that I shall carry to my grave a vision of stout, monolithic, utterly prosaic Mademoiselle Rose toiling across half a Department of France weeping because she had no pocket-handkerchief in which to mourn for her honoured dead.

Or you may read of little AndrÉ Moldinot, who was alone in the fields when he saw the Germans coming, and who ran away, drifting he doesn't know how to Bar-le-Duc, where he has remained in the care of kindly people, hearing no news of his family, not knowing whether they are alive or dead. Or of the old man, whose name I have forgotten—was it Galzandat?—who fought with the English in the Crimea, and who lived with fourteen other people (women and children) in a stifling hole in the rue Polval. Or of that awful room in the street near the Canal where thirty people ate and drank and slept and quarrelled a whole winter through—a room unspeakable in its dirt and untidiness. Old rags lay heaped on the floor, dirty crockery, potato, carrot and turnip peelings littered the greasy table, big palliasses strewed the corners, loathsome bedclothes crawling on them. On strings stretched from wall to wall clothes were drying (one inmate was a washerwoman), an old witch-like creature with matted, unkempt locks flitted about, and in the far corner, on the day I went there, two priests were offering ghostly counsel to a weeping woman.

Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the cyclone of war flung together people who, in ordinary circumstances, would have been far removed from one another's orbit. At first the good and the bad, the clean and the dirty, the thrifty and the drunken herded together, too wretched to complain, too crushed and despondent to hope for better things. But gradually temperament asserted itself, and one by one, as opportunity arose and their circumstances improved, the respectable ceased to rub elbows with the dissolute, and they found quarters of their own either through their own exertions or through the help of their friends. Monsieur C. and Madame B. (wise, witty, kindly Madame B.) were especially energetic in this respect.

So we soon began to feel comfortably assured that the tenants of Maison Blanpain and of one or two other rookeries were the scum of the refugee pool, idle, disreputable, swearing, undeserving vagabonds every one. They took us in gloriously many a time, they fooled us to the top of our sentimental bent—at first—but we could not have done without them. For though Virtue may bathe the world in still, white light, it is Vice that splashes the dancing colours over it.

IV

Yes, I suppose we were taken in at times!

On the outskirts of Bar, beyond the Faubourg Marbot, lies a wood called the Bois de Maestricht. The way to it lies through a narrow winding valley of great beauty, especially in the autumn when the fires of the dying year are ablaze in wood and field. Just at the end of the road where the woods crush down and engulf it is a long strip of meadow, a nocturne in green and purple when the autumn crocus is in flower, and in the woods are violets and wild strawberries, and long trails of lesser periwinkle, ivy crimson and white, and hellebore and oxlips and all sorts of delicious things, with, from just one point on one of the countless uphill paths, a view of Bar, so exquisite, so ethereal it almost seems like a glimpse of some far dream-silvered land.

And it was here, just on the edge of the wood, in a small rough shack, that Madame Martin and her family took up their abode. The shack consisted of one room, not long and certainly not wide, a slice of which, rudely partitioned off, did duty as a cow-house. Here lived Madame Martin and her husband, her granddaughter Alice, a small boy suffering from a malady which caused severe abdominal distention, and one or two other children. Le PÈre Battin, whose relationship was obscure but presumably deeply-rooted in the family soil, shared the cow-end with his beloved vache, a noble beast and, like himself, a refugee.

Le PÈre Battin always averred that he had adopted the cow, it being obviously an orphan, homeless and a beggar, but my own firm conviction is that he stole it. It was a kindly cow and a generous, for it proceeded speedily to enrich him with a calf which, unlike most refugee babies, throve amazingly, and when I saw it took up so much space in the narrow shed there was hardly room enough for its mother. How Le PÈre Battin squeezed himself in as well is a pure wonder. But squeeze he did, and when delicately suggesting that a gift of sheets from "Les Anglaises" would completely assuage the miseries of his lot, he showed me his bed. It was in the feeding-trough. One hurried glance was enough. I no longer wondered why the first visitor to the Martin abode, having unwisely settled down for a chat, spent the rest of the day and the greater part of the night in fruitless chase. I did not settle down. "It was fear, O Little Hunter, it was fear."

Nor did I give the sheets. The cow would have eaten them.

I remarked that the day was hot, and repaired to the garden (a wilderness of weeds and despairing flowers), and there Madame entertained me.

She was an ideal "case." Just the person whose photograph should be sent to kindly, generous souls at home. She was small, active, rather witty, a good talker, with darting brown eyes and a bewitching grin. She wore a befrilled cap, and oh, she could flatter with her tongue! A nice old soul in spite of the villainy with which PÈre Battin subsequently charged her. Her first visitor—she who unfortunately sat down—fell a victim on the spot. So did we all. Heaven had made Madame that way. It was inevitable. So all the riches of our earth were poured forth for her, and she devoured largely of our substance. Then the girl Alice developed throat trouble and was ministered to by our nurse, and she, I grieve to say, coming home one day from the Bois, hinted dark things about Alice—things which made our righteous judgment to stand on end. We continued to pet Madame Martin; we did everything we could for her except eat her jam. Having seen the shack, and le PÈre Battin and that one overcrowded room where flies in dense black swarms settled on everything, where dogs scratched and where age-old dirt gathered more dirt to its arms with the dawning of every day, that jam pot contained so many possibilities, we felt that to eat its contents would be sheer murder.

And so the autumn wore away and winter came, and then one day as I was going through the valley to visit some woodcutters in the Bois, I met le PÈre Battin driving home his cow. And he stopped me. Once when speaking of the Emperor of Austria he had said, "Il est en train de mourir? Bon. On a eu bien assez de ces lapins-lÀ." (He is dying? Good. We have had enough of such rabbits.)

A man who can discuss an Emperor in such terms is not lightly to be passed by, but I stood as far from him as possible. I did not till then believe that anybody could be as dirty as Father Battin and live.

But he thrust himself close, looking fearfully about him, sinking his voice to a hoarse whisper.

"Did I know the truth about the Martins? That Alice had gone to RÉvigny? There were soldiers there." He nodded sapiently. "But Alice was la vraie Comtesse de——" He mentioned a hyphenated name. "Yes. It was true. She was married. A young man, a fool. Mon Dieu, but a fool. She might live in a shack in the Bois and her grandmother might be an old peasant woman, but she was a Comtesse, wife of the Comte de——."

I took leave to suppose that PÈre Battin was mad.

But he was circumstantial. "Yes. Her husband had left her. An affair of a few weeks. Every gendarme in the town knew. And Madame knew. Knew and made money out of it. Many a good franc she had put in her pocket. But the gendarmes were watching, and one day the old woman and Alice would...." Again he murmured unprintable things.

"Monsieur, you are ridiculous." Alice Martin a Comtesse! No wonder I laughed. But he insisted. He kept on repeating it.

"La vraie Comtesse de——" But now she was....

The dark sayings of the district nurse came back to my mind and I wondered. But PÈre Battin was offensive to ear and eye. I wished him bonjour, watching him trailing down the path, his vache ruminatingly leading, and then went on my way to the wood.

An hour later Madame Martin came running down the hill to greet me. She had seen me go by and waited. In her hand was a bunch of flowers, the best, least discouraged from her untended garden.

"For Mademoiselle," she said, and as she held them out her smile scattered gold dust upon my heart.

Now do you think le PÈre Battin's story was true?