IN WHICH WE PLAY TRUANT

I

Without wishing in the least to malign my fellow-men, I am minded to declare that a vast percentage of them are hypocrites. Not that they know it or would believe you if you told them so. Your true poseur imposes acutely on himself, believing implicitly in his own deceptions; but the discerning mind is ever swift to catch an attitude, and never more so than when it is struck before the Mirror of Charity.

Consequently, when people tell me they go to the War Zone in singleness of purpose, anxious only to succour the stricken, I take leave to be incredulous. The thing is impossible. Every one who isn't a slug likes to go to the War Zone, every one who isn't an animated suet-pudding wants to see a battlefield, or a devastated village, or a trench, or a dug-out, and we all want souvenirs de la guerre, shell cases, bits of bomb or shrapnel, the head of the Crown Prince on a charger, or the helmet of a Death's Head Hussar. And do we not all love adventure, and variety—unless fear has made imbeciles of us, and the chance of distinguishing ourselves, of winning the Legion of Honour in a shell-swept village, or the Croix de Guerre under the iron rain of a Taube?

I believe we do, though few of us confess it. We prefer to look superior, to pretend we "care nothing for all that," and so I cry, "Hypocrites! Search your hearts for your motives and you will find them as complex as the machinery that keeps you alive."

Search mine for my motive and you will find it compounded of many simples, but of their nature and composition it is not for me to speak. Has it not been written that I am a modest woman?

And methinks indifferent honest. That is why I am going to tell you about Villers-aux-Vents. You must not labour under a delusion that life was all hard work and no play in the War Zone.

It was no high-souled purpose that led us to Villers. It was just curiosity, common curiosity. Later on we spent a night (Saturday night, of course) at Greux, and visited the shrine of Jeanne D'Arc at Domremy, but that was not out of curiosity. It was hero-worship coupled with a passion for historical research.

And we planned to go to Toul and Nancy. Now when people make plans they should carry them out. The gods rarely send the dish of opportunity round a second time, and when the Carnet d'Étranger chained us body and soul to l'autoritÉ compÉtente militaire there was no second time. The dish had gone by; it would never come again.

Wherefore I am wrath with the gods, and still more wrath with myself, for I have not seen Nancy, and I have not seen Toul, and if the old grognard had been in good humour I might even have gone to Verdun. Maddening, isn't it? Especially as then, when our work was only, so to speak, getting into its stride, we might have virtuously spared the time. Later on when it increased, and when we bowed to a Directrice who has found the secret of perpetual motion, we worked Saturday, Sundays and all sometimes; but in 1915 we were not yet super-normal men. We could still enjoy a holiday. And so we decided to go to Villers-aux-Vents. To go before winter had snatched the gold mantle from the limbs of autumn, to go while yet the sun was high and the long day stretched before us, languorous, beautiful.

And the manner of our going was thus, by train to RÉvigny at 7.20 a.m., and then on foot over the road.

Now it is written that if you get into a westward-bound omnibus train at Bar-le-Duc, in fulness of time you will arrive at RÉvigny. The train will be packed with soldiers, so of course you travel first-or second-class, thereby incurring a small measure of seclusion and a larger one of boredom. In Class Three it is never dull. You may be offered cakes or a hunk of bread which has entered into unwilling alliance with sausage, you may be invited to drink the health of the Allies in rank red wine, or you may be offered a faithful heart, lifelong adoration and an income of five sous a day. Or (but for this you must keep your ears wide open, for the train makes un bruit infernale, and speech is a rapid, vivacious, eager thing in France) you may hear tales of the war, episodes of the trenches, comments upon the method of the Boche, things many of them hardly fit for publication but drawn naked and quivering from the wells of life.

Unless he has been refreshing a vigorous thirst, the poilu is rarely unmanageable. He is the cheekiest thing in the universe, he has a twinkle in his eye that can set a whole street aflame, and he is filled with an accommodating desire to go with you just as far as you please. Nevertheless, he can take a hint quicker than any man I know, and his genius in extricating himself from a difficult situation is that of the inspired tactician.

Madame B., pursuing her philanthropic way, came out of a shop one day to find a spruce poilu comfortably ensconced in her carriage. With arms folded and legs crossed he surveyed the world with conquering eyes.

"I am coming for a drive with you," he remarked genially, and his smile was the smile of a seductive angel, his assurance that of a king.

"Au contraire," replied Madame B. (the poilu was not for her, as for us, an undiscovered country bristling with possibilities of adventure), and his abdication was the most graceful recorded in history.

Now, I wouldn't advise you to accept every offer of companionship you get from a poilu, but you may accept some. More than one tedious mile of road is starred for me with memories of childlike, simple souls, burning with curiosity about all things English, and above all about the independent female bipeds who have no apparent fear of man, God or devil, nor even—bien entendu—of that most captivating of all created things, the blue-coated, trench-helmeted French soldier.

"You march well, Mademoiselle; you would make a fine soldier." Thus a voice behind me as I swung homewards down the hill one chilly evening. A sense of humour disarms me on these occasions. One day, no doubt, it will lead me into serious trouble. I didn't wither him. One soon learns when east winds should blow, and when the sun, metaphorically speaking, may shine. We walked amicably into Bar together, and before we parted he told me all about the little wife who was waiting for him in Paris, and the fat baby who was tout-À fait le portrait de son pÈre.

So ponder long and carefully before you choose your carriage, but if your ponderings are as long as this digression you will never get to RÉvigny. Even an omnibus train starts some time, and generally when you least expect it.

At Mussey if you crane your head out of the window you may see two wounded German prisoners, white-faced, mud-caked wretches who provoke no comment. At RÉvigny you will see soldiers (if I told you how many pass through in a day the Censor would order me to be immersed in a vat of official ink); and you will see ruins. The Town Hall is an eyeless skeleton leering down the road, the Grande Place—there is no Grande Place, there is only a scattered confusion of fire-charred stones and desiccated brick.

It was rather foggy that Sunday morning and the town looked used up. Not an attractive place in its palmiest days we decided as we slung our luncheon bags over our shoulders and set out for Villers. Away to the left we could see Brabant-le-Roi, and it was there some weeks later that I assisted at the incineration of a pig. He lay by the roadside in a frame of blazing straw. Flames lapped his ponderous flanks, and swept across his broad back, blue smoke curled around him, an odour of roasting pig hung in the air. A crowd of women and soldiers stood like devotees about a shrine. The flames leaped, and fell. Then came men who lifted him up and laid him on a stretcher. In his neck there was a gaping wound, and out of the fire that refined him he was no longer an Olympian sacrifice, he was mouldering pig, dead pig, black pig, nauseating, horrible. I turned to fly, but a voice detained me.

"Madame Bontemps will be killing to-morrow. If Mademoiselle would like to see?"

But "to-morrow" Mademoiselle was happily far on her way to Troyes, and the swan-song of Madame Bontemps' gros cochon fell on more appreciative ears.

However, on that Sunday morning in September there was no pig, and our "satiable curiosity" led us far from poor battered Brabant. Our road was to the right and "uphill all the way." The apple trees on the Route Nationale were crusted with ripe red fruit, but we resisted temptation, our only loot being a shell-case which we discovered in a field, which was exceedingly heavy and with which we weighted ourselves for the sake of an enthusiastic youngster at home. My arm still aches when I think of that shell-case, for by this time the sun had burst out, it was torridly hot, the apple trees gave very little shade, and our too, too solid flesh was busily resolving itself into a dew.

However, we persevered, the object of our pilgrimage being a square hole dug in a sunny orchard on the brow of the hill above Villers. Some rude earthen steps gave access to it, the roof was supported by two heavy beams, and the floor and sides were lined with carved panels wrenched from priceless old armoires taken from the village. It is known as the Crown Prince's Funk Hole, and the story goes that from its shelter he ordered, and subsequently watched, the destruction of the village. The dug-out, a makeshift affair, the Crown Prince's tenancy being of short duration, is well placed. The hill falls away behind it, running at right angles to the opening there is a thick hedge, trees shelter it, the line of a rough trench or two, now filled in, runs protectingly on its flank. The fighting in this region was open, a war of movement lasting only a few days, so trench lines are not very plentiful. Just opposite the mouth of the dug-out there is a fenced-in cross, a red kÉpi hangs on the point, a laurel wreath tied with tri-coloured ribbon is suspended from the arms. "An unknown French soldier." Did he fall there in the rush of battle, or did he creep up hoping to get one clean neat shot at the Prince of Robbers and so put him out of action for ever?

As for Villers itself, it was wiped out of existence. One house, and only one, remains, and even that is battered. One might speculate a little on the psychology of houses. The pleasant fire-cracker pastilles that wrought so much havoc elsewhere were impotent here. The Germans flung in one after another, we were told, using every incendiary device at their disposal, but that house refused to burn. There it stands triumphantly in its tattered garden, not far from the church, and when I saw it an old woman with a reaping-hook in her hand was standing by the hedge watching me with curious eyes. We had separated, my companion and I, farther down the long village street, she to meditate among the ruins, I to mourn over the shattered belfry-tower, the bell hurled to the ground, the splintered windows, the littered ruined interior. In the cemetery were many soldiers' graves; on one inscribed, "Two unknown German officers," some one had scribbled "À bas les Boches," the only instance that came to my knowledge of the desecration of a German grave. And even here contrition followed fast upon the heels of anger, and heavy scrawlings did their best to obliterate the bitter little phrase. The French—in the Marne at least—have been scrupulous in their reverence for the German dead, the graves are fenced in just as French graves are, and the name whenever possible printed on the cross. I suppose that even the soppiest sentimentalist would not ask that they should be decorated with flowers?

As I left the graveyard and looked back at the desolation that once was Villers, but where even now wooden houses were springing hopefully from the ground, the old woman with the reaping-hook spoke to me. My dress betrayed me; she knew without asking that I was British. And, as is the way with these French peasants, she fell easily and naturally into her story. I wish I could tell it to you just as she told it to me, but I know I shall never find her simple dignity of phrase, or her native instinct for the mot juste. However, such as it is you shall have it, and if it please you not, skip. That refuge is always open to the bored or tired reader.

II

Old Madame Pierrot was disturbed in spirit. She could see the flames leaping above burning villages across the plain, the earth shook with the menace of the guns, the storm was rising, every moment brought the waves of the encroaching sea nearer to her home. Yet people said that Villers was safe. The Germans could never get so far as that, they would be turned back long before they reached the hill. She was alone in her comfortable two-storied house (the house she had built only a few years before, and which had a fine yard behind it closed in by spacious stables, cow-houses and barns), and she was sadly in need of advice. She had no desire whatever to make the personal acquaintance of any German invader. Even the honour of receiving the Crown Prince made no appeal to her soul. She had heard something of his arch little ways and his tigerish playfulness, and though she could hardly suppose that he would favour a woman of her dried and lean years with special attention, she reasonably feared that she might be called on to assist at one of his festivals. And an Imperial degenerate will do that in public which decent women are ashamed to talk about, much less to witness. So Madame was perturbed in soul. The battle raged through the woods and over the plain, it crept nearer ... nearer....

"Madame, Madame, come. Is it that you wish the Germans to get you?" A wagon was drawn up at the door, in it were friends who lived higher up the street. "Come with us to Laimont. You will be safer there."

So they called to her and put an end to her doubt. Snatching up a basket, she stuffed into it all the money she had in the house, various family papers and documents, and then, just as she was, in her felt-soled slippers with her white befrilled cap on her head, in her cotton dress without even a shawl to cover her, she clambered into the wagon and set out. Laimont was only a few miles away; indeed, I think you can see the church spire and the roofs of the houses from the hill. There the wagon halted. In a few hours the Germans would be gone, and then one could go peaceably home again. But time winged away, the battle raged more fiercely than ever, soon perhaps Laimont itself would be involved and see hand-to-hand fighting in its streets.

Laimont! Madame was desolÉe. OÙ aller? Farther south, farther east? The Germans were everywhere. And voyager comme Ça in her old felt slippers, in her working clothes, without wrap or cloak to cover her? Impossible. The wagon must wait. There was still time. Ces salauds would not reach Laimont yet. Why, look! Villers itself was free. There was no fire, no smoke rising on the hill. Her friends would wait while she went back au grand galop to put on her boots, and her bonnet and her Sunday clothes. "HÉ, mon Dieu, it is not in the petticoat of the fields that one runs over France."

Away she went, her friends promising to wait for her. Laden down by the shell, we who were lusty and strong found the road from Villers to Laimont unendingly long, yet no grisly fears gnawed at our heart-strings, no sobs rose chokingly to be thrust back again ... and yet again. Nor had we the hill to climb, and no shells were bursting just ahead. So what can it have been for Madame? But she pressed on; old, tired and, oh, so dismayed, she panted up the steep hill that curls into the village, and walked right into the arms of the Crown Prince's men. In a trice she was a prisoner, one of eighty, some of whom were soldiers, the rest civilians, who, like herself, had committed the egregious folly of being born west of the Rhine, and were now about to suffer for it.

What particular crime Villers-aux-Vents had committed to merit destruction I cannot tell. Perhaps it never committed any. The Crown Prince was not always a minister of Justice promulgating sentence upon crime. He was more often a Nero loving a good red blaze for its own sake, or it may be an Æsthete of emotion, a super-sensualist of cruelty, or just a devil hot from the stones of hell.

Whatever the reason, Villers was doomed. Out came the pastilles and the petrol-sprayers: the most determined destruction was carried on. Not only were the houses themselves destroyed but the outhouses, the stables, solid brick and mortar constructions running back to a depth of several feet. And I gathered that the usual pillage inaugurated the reign of fire.

Of this, however, Madame knew nothing. She and her seventy-nine companions in misery were marched away to the north, mile after mile to Stenay, and if you look at the map you will see that the distance is not small, it was a march of several days.

Madame, as I have told you, was old, and her slippers had soles of felt, and so the time came when her feet were torn and bleeding, and when, famished and exhausted, she could no longer keep step with her guards. Her pace became slower and slower. Ah, God, what was that? Only the butt-end of a rifle falling heavily across her back. She nerved herself for another effort, staggered on to falter once more. Again the persuasion of the rifle. Again the shrewd, cruel blow, and a bayonet flashing under her eyes.

A diet of black bread three times a day does not encourage one to take violent exercise, but black bread was all that they got, and I think the rifle-butts worked very hard during that long weary march.

On arrival they were herded into a church and then into a prison, where they were brutally treated at first, but subsequently, when French people were put in charge, found life a little less intolerable. And later on some residents still living in the town were kind to her, but during all the months—some eight or nine—that she was imprisoned there she had no dress but the one, nothing to change into, nothing to keep out the sharp winter cold.

Madame Walfard the basket-maker told me some gruesome tales about Stenay, and what happened there, but this is not a book of atrocities. Perhaps it ought to be, perhaps every one who is in a position to do so should cry aloud the story in a clear clarion call to the civilised world, but—isn't the story known? Can anything I have to say add a fraction of a grain of weight to the evidence already collected? Is the world even now so immature in its judgment that it supposes that the men who sacked Louvain, the men who violated Belgium behaved like gallant gentlemen in the sunnier land of France? Do we not know all of us that, added to the deliberate German method, there was the lasciviousness of drunkenness? That the Germans poured into one of the richest wine-growing countries in the world during one of the hottest months of the year, that their thirst at all times is a mighty one, and when excited by the frenzy of battle it was unassuageable? They drank, and they drank again. They rioted in cellars containing thousands of bottles of good wine, and they emerged no longer men but demons, whose officers laughed to see them come forth, sure now that no lingering spark of human or divine fire would hold them back from frightfulness.

Of course we know it was so, and therefore I am not going to dilate upon horrors. Let the kharma of the Germans be their witness and their judge. Only this in fairness should be told—that the behaviour of the men varied greatly in different regiments. "It all depended upon the Commandant," summed up one narrator, "and the first armies were the worst."

"And the Crown Prince's army?" I asked; "what of that?"

He shrugged. What can be expected from the followers of such a leader? Their exploits put mediÆval mercenaries to shame.

Stenay must find another historian; but even while I refuse to become the chronicler of atrocities, every line I write rises up to confute me. For was not the very invasion of France an "atrocity"? Is the word so circumscribed in its meaning that it contains only arson, murder and rape? Does not the refinement of suffering inflicted upon every refugee, upon every homeless sinistrÉ, upon the basket-makers of Vaux-les-Palamies as upon Madame Lassanne, and poor old creatures like the Leblans fall within it too, and would not the Germans stand convicted before the Tribunal of such narratives even if the gross sins of the uncivilised beast had never been laid at their door?

Madame Pierrot told me nothing about Stenay—perhaps she saw nothing but the inside of her prison walls—but she told me a great deal about the kindness of the Swiss when she crossed the frontier one happy day, and the joy-bells were ringing in her heart. They gave her food and drink, they overwhelmed her with sympathy, they offered her clothes. But Madame said no. She was a propriÉtaire, she had good land in Villers.

"Keep the clothes for others, they will need them more than I. In my house at Villers-aux-Vents there are armoires full of linen and underclothing, everything that I need. I can wait."

I often wonder whether realisation came to her at RÉvigny, or whether, all ignorant of the tragedy, she walked blithely up the hill, the joy-bells ringing their Te Deum in her heart, her thoughts flitting happily from room to room, from armoire to armoire, conning over again the treasures she had been parted from so long. Did she know only as she turned the last sharp bend in the road and saw the village dead at her feet? Ah, whether she knew as she trudged over the much-loved road, or whether knowledge came only with sight, what a home-coming was that! She found the answer to the eternal question, "What shall we find when we return?" ... How many equally poignant answers still lie hidden in the womb of time to be brought forth in anguish when at last the day of restoration comes?

III

Even the longest story must come to an end some time, and so did Madame Pierrot's. Conscience, tugging wildly at the strings of memory, spoke to me of my lost comrade; the instinct of hospitality asserted itself in Madame's soul. We were strangers, we must see the sights. Would I go with her to her "house," and to the dug-out of the Crown Prince? Yes? Bon. Allons. And away we trotted to gather up the lost one among the ruins, to inspect the dug-out, to eat delicious little plums which Madame gathered for us in the orchard, and finally to be seized by the pangs of a righteous hunger which simply shrieked for food. Where should we eat? Madame mourned over her brick and rubble. If we had come before the war she would have given us a dÉjeuner fit for a king. A good soup, an omelette, des confitures, a cheese of the country, coffee, but now? "Regardez, Mademoiselle. Ah que c'est triste. Il n'y a rien du tout, du tout, du tout." And indeed there was nothing but a mound of material that might have been mistaken for road rubbish.

Eventually she found a stone bench in the yard, and there we munched our sandwiches while she flitted away, to come back presently with bunches of green grapes, sweet enough but very small. The vine had not been tended for a year, it was running wild. They were not what ces dames should be given, but if we would accept them? We would have taken prussic acid from her just then, I believe, but fortunately it did not occur to her to offer it. She cut us dahlias from her ragged garden (once loved and carefully tended), and hearing that one of us was a connoisseur in shell-cases, bits of old iron and other gruesome relics, rooted about until she found another shell-case, with which upon our backs we staggered over to Laimont.

And now let me hereby solemnly declare that if any one ever dares to tell me that the French are inhospitable I will smite him with a great and deadly smiting. I am not trying to suggest that they clasped us in their arms and showered riches upon us within an hour of our meeting. They showed a measure of sanity and caution in all their ways. They waited to see what manner of men we were before they flung wide their doors, but once the doors were wide the measure of their generosity was only limited by the extent of our need.

Was it advice, an introduction to an influential person, a string pulled here, a barrier broken down there, Madame B. and Madame D. were always at our service. Gifts of fruit and flowers came constantly to our door, our bidons were miraculously filled with paraffin in a famine which we, being foolish virgins, had not foreseen, or, foreseeing, had not guarded against, and once in the heavy frost, when wood was unobtainable in the town and the supply ordered from Sermaize was over-long in coming, our lives were saved by a bag of oak blocks which scented the house, and boulets that made the stove glow with magnificent ardour. In every difficulty we turned to Madame B. She helped us out of many an impasse, and whether we asked her to buy dolls in Paris or, by persuading a General and his Staff that without our timely aid France could never win the war, to reconcile an Army Corps to our erratic activities in its midst, she never failed us. When two of our party planned a week-end shopping expedition to Nancy, it was Madame B. who discovered that the inhabitants of that much-harassed town were leading frozen lives in their cellars, and if she was sometimes electrifyingly candid in her criticism, she was equally unstinted in her praise. Madame D., with her old-world courtesy, was no less hospitable, and many a frantic S.O.S. brought her at top speed to our door.

From Monsieur C., who used to assure us that we dispensed our gifts with a dÉlicatesse that was parfait, and Madame K. showering baskets of luscious raspberries, to the poorest refugee who begged us to drink a glass of wine with her, or who deeply regretted her inability to make some little return for the help we had given her, they outvied one another in refuting the age-old libel on the character of the French.

"But," cries some acidulated critic, "you would have us believe that the poilu is a blue-winged angel, and the civilian too perfect to live." Far from it. The poilu is only a man, the civilian only human, and I have yet to learn that either—be he man or human—is perfect any more than he, or his equivalent is perfect even in this perfect English island in the sea. There are soldiers who.... There are civilians who....

I guess the devil doesn't inject original sin into them with a two-pronged hypodermic syringe any more than he injects it into us. The good and the evil sprout up together, or are they the spiritual Siamese twin that is born of every one of us to be a perpetual confusion to our minds, a bewilderment to our bodies and a most difficult progeny to rear at the best of times? For as surely as you encourage one of the twins the other sets up a roar, sometimes they howl together, sometimes one stuffs his fist down the other's throat. And the bad one is hard to kill, and the good one has a tendency to rickets. No wonder it is a funny muddle of a world.

And the French have their twin too, only theirs say la-la and ours say damn, and if they keep an over-sharp eye on the sous, do we turn our noses up at excess profits?

Of course some of them are greedy, perhaps greedier on the whole than we are. Would any English village lock its wells when thirsty children wailed at its door? I know an Irish one would not. But the French are thrifty, and the majority of them would live comfortably on what a British family wastes. They work hard too. They are incredibly industrious, perhaps because they have to be.

France has not yet been inoculated with the virus of philanthropy, an escape on which she may possibly be congratulated. The country is not covered with a network of charitable societies overlapping and criss-crossing like railway lines at a junction, nor have French women of birth, independent means and superfluous energy our genius for managing other people's affairs so well there is no time to look after our own. The deserving poor run no risk of being pauperised, the undeserving don't keep secretaries, committees and tribes of enthusiastic females labouring heavily at their heels. The French family in difficulties has to depend on its own resources, its own wit, its own initiative and energy, and when I think of the way our refugees dug themselves in in Bar-le-Duc, and scratched and scraped, and hammered and battered at that inhospitable soil till they forced a living from its breast, my faith in philanthropy and the helping hand begins to wane.

Of course there are hard cases, where a little intelligent human sympathy would transform suffering and sorrow into contentment and joy, cases that send me flying remorsefully back to the altar of organised charity with an offering in outstretched hand, but above all these, over all the agony of war the stern independence of French character has ridden supreme.

So let their faults speak for themselves. Who am I that I should expose them to a pitiless world? Have I not faults of my own? See how I have kept poor Madame Pierrot gathering dahlias in her garden, and my comrade in adventure eating grapes upon a very stony seat. So long that now there is no time to tell you how we walked to Laimont and investigated more ruins there, and then how we walked to Mussey where we comfortably missed our train, and how a Good Samaritan directed us to a house, and how in the house we found a little old lady whose son had been missing since August 1914, and who pathetically wondered whether we could get news of him, and how a sauf-conduit had to be coaxed from the Mayor, and the little old lady's horse harnessed to a car, and how two chairs were planted in the car and we superficially planted on the chairs, and how the old lady and a brigand clambered on to the board in front, and how we drove down to Bar as the sun was setting. Nor can I tell you how nearly we were run into by a motor-car, nor how the old lady explained that the brigand was malheureusement nearly blind, and that she, still more malheureusement, was rather deaf, nor how we prayed as we clung desperately to the chairs which slid and wobbled and rocked and oscillated, and rattled our bones while all the military motor-cars in France sought our extermination.

Nor can I tell you how at a dangerous crossing the brigand drew up his steed, and set up a wail because he had forgotten his cigarettes, nor how one escapading female produced State Express which made him splutter and cough, and nearly wreck us in the ditch (though English tobacco is not nearly so strong as French), nor how we came at last to Bar-le-Duc, nor how the old lady demanded a ridiculously small fee for the journey, nor how I lost a glove, and the sentries eyed us with suspicion, and the brigand who was blind and la patronne who was deaf drove away in the fading light to Mussey, the aroma of State Express trailing out behind them, and the old horse plodding wearily in the dust.