THE MODERN CALVARY

I

One day, not long after our visit to the battlefield, our composure was riven to its very foundations by an invitation to play croquet in the garden of Madame G. Could we spare an hour from our so arduous toil? For her it would be a pleasure so great, the English they love "le sport," they play all the games, we would show her the English way. Monsieur her husband he adored croquet, but never, never could he find any one to play with him. Madame, a little swarthy woman who always dressed in rusty black, clasped her shiny kid gloves together and gazed at us beseechingly. The Arbiter of our destinies decided that we must go. There is always l'Entente, you know, it should be encouraged at all hazards, a sentiment which meets with my fullest approval when the hazard does not happen to be mine.

Madame yearned that we should throw ourselves into "le sport" at four, but the devil of malice, who sits so persistently on my shoulder, arranged that I should be the only one free at that hour. The others promised to come at half-past four.

"But, my dear women," I cried, "I haven't played croquet for ages."

"Never mind. Hit something, do anything. But go."

I went. I was ushered into a tiny and stuffy parlour, and there for twenty interminable, brain-racking minutes I confronted Madame G. Then an old lady in a bath-robe sidled into the room, and we all confronted one another for ten minutes more. Madame G. may be a devil of a fellow with a croquet-mallet in her hand, but small talk is not her strong point. Neither is it mine, for the matter of that, when I am slowly suffocating in a foreign land. However, we finally adjourned to the garden. Where, oh where was the croquet ground? Where, oh where were my faithless companions? Where, oh where was tea? A quarter to five rang out from the tower of NÔtre Dame, and here was I marooned on a French grass plot adorned with trees, real trees, apple trees, plum trees, an enterprising pergola, several flower-beds and, Heaven help me! croquet hoops—hoops that had just happened, all anyhow, no two looking in the same direction. In direct line of fire rose a tall birch tree. I gazed at it in despair. A niblick, or a lofter, or a crane might get a ball over it, but a croquet mallet?... Circumvention was impossible. There were three bunkers.

"It is like your English croquet grounds?" Madame asked. "We play all the Sundays——"

"Ah, yes, through the Looking-glass," I murmured, and she responded—

"PlaÎt-il?"

I hastily congratulated her on the condition of her fruit trees.

Five o'clock. What I thought of the faithless was by now so sulphuric, blue flames must have been leaping out of me. Five-fifteen. A Sail! The Arbiter, full of apologies, which did nothing to soften the steely reproval in my eye. Then Madame disappeared. At five-thirty she came back again accompanied by delinquent number two. She held a hurried consultation with the bath-robe, then melted again into the void.

"Can I go?" I signalled to the Arbiter. She shook a vigorous head. The rattle of tea-cups was coming from afar. At a quarter to six Madame announced tea. It was served in the dining-room. We all sat round a square table very solemnly—it was evidently the moment of Madame's life; there was no milk, we were expected to use rum—or was it gin?—instead. Anyway I know it was white, and one of us tried it, and I know ... well, politeness conquered, but she has been a confirmed teetotaller ever since.

At six-five Madame was weeping as she recounted a tale she had read in the paper a day or so before, and six-twenty-five we came away.

"And we never played croquet after all. But you will come again when Monsieur mon mari is here, for Les Anglaises they love 'le sport.'"

But we never went back. Perhaps the tree-tops frightened us, or perhaps we were becoming too much engrossed in sport of another kind. You see, M. le CurÉ of N. came to visit us the next day, and soon after that Madame Lassanne inscribed her name on our books. Which shall I tell you about first? Madame Lassanne, who was a friend of Madame Drouet, and actually succeeded in making her talk for quite a long time on the stairs one day? I think so.

Perhaps to-morrow I shall tell you of M. Le CurÉ.

You see, it was really Madame Lassanne who first brought home to me what war means to the civil population in an invaded district. One guessed it all in a dim way before, of course, every imaginative person does, but not in the way in which pain, desolation of spirit, agony of soul, poignant anxiety drive their roots deep down into Life; nor does one realise how small a thing is human life, how negligible man when compared with the great god of War.

A French medical officer once said to me, "Mademoiselle, in war les civiles n'ont pas le droit d'Être malade," and I dared to reply, "Monsieur, ils n'ont guÈre le droit de vivre." And he assented, for he knew, knew that to a great extent it was true, only too pitiably true. For the great military machine which exists in order that an unshakable bulwark may be set up between the invader and the civilians whom he would crush is, in its turn, and in order to keep that bulwark firm, obliged to crush them himself. In the War Zone (it is not too much to say it) the civilian is an incubus, an impediment, a most infernal nuisance. He gets so confoundedly in the way. And he is swept out of it as ruthlessly as a hospital matron sweeps dust out of her wards. That he is confused and bewildered, thoroughly dÉsorientÉ, that he may be sick or feeble, that his wife may be about to give birth to a child, that his house is in ashes and that he, once prosperous, is now a destitute pauper, that his children trail pitifully in the dust, footsore, frightened, terror-haunted to the very verge of insanity, all these things from the military point of view matter nothing. And it must be so. They dare not matter. If they did, energies devoted to keeping that human bulwark in the trenches fit and sound might be diverted into other channels, and the effort to ameliorate and save become the hand of destruction, ruining all in order to save a little.

Think of one village. There are thousands, and any one will do. Anxiety and apprehension have lain over it for days, but the inhabitants go about their work, eat, sleep, "carry on" much as usual. Night comes. It is pitch dark. The world is swathed in a murky shroud. At two o'clock loud hammering is heard, the gendarmes are going from house to house beating upon the doors. "Get up, get up; in half an hour you must be gone." Dazed with sleep, riven with fear, grief slowly closing her icy fingers upon their hearts, they stumble from their beds and throw on a few clothes. They look round the rooms filled with things nearly every one of which has a history, things of no intrinsic value, but endeared to them by long association, and it may be by memory of days when Love and Youth went hand in hand to the Gates of Romance and they opened wide at their touch. Things, too, that no money can buy: old armoires wonderfully carved, old china, old pottery, handed down from father to son, from mother to child for generations.

What would one choose in such a moment as that?

"You can take nothing but what you can carry." Nothing. The children clutch at hand and skirt. How can Marie and Germaine and Jean and Robert walk fifteen or twenty kilomÈtres to safety?

The prudent snatch at their family papers, thrust a little food into a bag and go out into the night. Others gather up useless rubbish because it lies under their hand. The gendarmes are growing impatient. They round up their human flock as a dog rounds up his sheep. Shells are beginning to fall here and there. Some one has been killed—a child. Then a woman. There are cries, a long moan of pain. But the refugees must hurry on.

"VÎte, vÎte, depÊchez-vous." They stumble down the roads, going they know not whither, following the lanes, the woods, even the fields, for the main road must be kept clear for the army. Hunger, thirst, the torment of an August day must be endured, exhaustion must be combated. Death hovers over them. He stoops and touches now one, now another with his wings, and quietly they slip down upon the parched and baking earth, for they are old and weary, and rest is sweet after the long burden of the day.

But even this is not all. One may believe that at first, engulfed by the instinct of self-preservation, tossed by the whirlwind from one emotion to another and into the lowest pit of physical pain, the mind is too confused, too stunned to realise the full significance of all that is happening.

But once in their new quarters, with the long days stretching out ahead and the dark night behind, in wretchedness, in bitter poverty, ah! then Thoughts, Memories, Regrets and Infinite Lonelinesses throng upon them, and little by little realisation comes and at last they KNOW.

Know that the broken threads of life can never be taken up again in the old good way. "On Était si heureux lÀ-bas."[5] How often I have heard that said! "On vivait tout doucement. On n'Était pas riche, ma fois, but we had enough!" Poignant words those, in Refugee-land.

Added to the haunting dread of the future there is always the ghost-filled dream of the past. Women who have spoken with steady composure of the loss of thousands of francs, of the ruin of businesses built up through years of patient industry and hard work, of farms—rich, productive, well-stocked—- laid waste and bare, have broken down and sobbed pitifully when speaking of some trivial intrinsically-valueless possession. How our hearts twine themselves round these ridiculous little things, what colour, what meaning they lend to life!

To lose them, ah, yes! that is bad enough; but to know that hands stained with blood will snatch at them and turn them over, and that eyes still bestial with lust will appraise their value.... That is where the sharpest sting lies. The man or woman whose house is effaced by a shell is happy indeed compared with those who have seen the Germans come, who have watched the pillage and the looting and the sacrilege of all they hold most dear.

But the ÉmigrÉ's cup must hold even greater sorrows and anxieties than these. "C'est un vrai Calvaire que nous souffrons, Mademoiselle." So they will tell you, and it is heartbreakingly true. Crucified upon the iron cross of German ambition, they pray daily that the cup may be taken from them, but the mocking god of War still holds it to their lips. They must drink it even to the very dregs.

For not always could all the members of a family get away together. It has been the fate of many to remain behind, to become prisoners in the shadowed land behind the trenches, at the mercy of a merciless foe. Between them and their relatives in uninvaded France no direct communication can be established. An impenetrable shutter is drawn down between. Only at rare intervals news can come, and that is when a soldier son or father or other near relative becomes a prisoner of war in Germany. A French woman in the pays envahi may write to a prisoner in Germany, and he to her. He may also write to his friends in the free world beyond. And so it sometimes happens that news trickles through, but very rarely. The risk is tremendous, detection heavily punished. Only oblique reference can be indulged in, and when one has heard nothing for months, perhaps years, how meagre and unsatisfying that must be. Do we in England realise what it means? I know I did not before I met Madame Lassanne, and only very inadequately as I sat in the kitchen of the Ferme du Popey and listened to her story.

II

She was the daughter of one farmer, the wife of another and successful one, the richest in their district, so people said. When the war broke out her husband was mobilised, she with her three children, a girl of four, a boy of two and a month-old baby, remaining at the farm with her father and mother. A few days, perhaps a week or two passed, then danger threatened. Harnessing their horses to the big farm wagons, she and the old man packed them with literie, duvets, furniture, food, clothes, everything they could find room for, and prepared to leave the village. But the gendarmes forbade it. I suppose the road was needed for military purposes: heavy farm wagons might delay the passage of the troops. Throughout the whole of one day they waited. Still the barrier was not withdrawn. Shells began to rain on the village; first one house, then another caught fire.

"You may go." The order came at last. The children, with their grandmother and an aunt of the Lassannes, were placed in the wagons and the little procession set out; but they were not destined to go far that day. At the next village the barrier fell again. Believing that the Germans were following close behind, they held hasty consultation, as the result of which the old women decided to walk on with the children, leaving M. Breda and Madame to follow as soon as the way was clear.

So the horses and wagons were put into a stable, and Madame and her father sat down to wait. The slow hours ticked away, a shell screamed overhead, another, then another. Soon they were falling in torrents on the little street. Houses began to crash down, the stable caught fire, the four horses and the wagons were burned to a cinder. Then the house in which the refugees had sheltered was struck. They escaped by a miracle, crawling on hands and knees. So terrific was the bombardment they dared not go down the road. A barrage of shell-fire played over it. With some dozens of others as miserable as themselves they lay all night in a furrow in a beet-field, Madame trembling in her father's arms, for shells were falling incessantly on the field and all around them. At dawn the hurricane ceased, and they crept away. The road was open now, they were on foot. They walked fast, then faster, hoping every minute to overtake the children. The old women surely could not have gone very far. But mile after mile was conquered and no news of them could be found. No sentries had seen them, no gendarme had watched them go by. They asked every one they met on the road, at first hopefully, then, as fear grew, with clutching hands and fevered eyes. But the answer was always the same. They had not passed that way. Chance, Fate, call it what you will, brought Madame and the old man to Bar-le-Duc, and there, soon after her arrival, she heard that her husband had been wounded in the earliest of the fighting and was now a prisoner in Germany. A prisoner and ill. Day after day dragged by. She found employment on the farm near the town, she made inquiries, exhausted every channel of information, but no trace of the children could be found.

And her husband, writing from Germany, demanded news of them! He did not know that the farm was demolished, and that she was beggared. He asked for parcels, for comforts. She sent them to him, by what supreme effort of self-denial only she and the God she prayed to know. And she wrote him little notes, gay, brave little notes. She told him all about the children—how fat and how strong they were.... And Marie—ah, Marie was growing tall—so tall.... And Roger was able to talk now....

God only knows what it cost her to write those letters; God only knows with what agony she forced her tears back to their source lest one, falling on the paper, betray her. She went about her work white-faced and worn, hungering for the news that never came, and autumn faded into winter and spring was born and blossomed into summer, and then, and then only, did the shutter lift and a tiny ray of light come through.

Confused and frightened, the old women, burdened with the children, had lost their way in the darkness and wandered back into the German lines. They were now prisoners in Carignan (near the frontier); they managed to smuggle a letter through. The baby was dead. There was no milk to be had, so it died of starvation. Madame Breda had been offered freedom. If she wished she would be sent back into France through Switzerland. But the children's names were not on the list of those selected for repatriation.

"Could they go with her?"

"No."

"Eh bien, j'y reste."

The shutter snapped down again, the veil enclosed them, and Madame resigned herself to the long, weary waiting.

Was it any wonder that such stories as this—and there were all too many of them—filled us with hatred of everything German? In those first months of personal contact with war we were always at white heat, consumed with rage and indignation, and for my own part, at least, desirous of nothing less than the extermination of kultur and every exponent of it. As I walked home through the quiet afternoon, dark thoughts filled my mind. What a monster one can be! What longing for vengeance even the mildest of us can cherish! I thought of another village not far from that of Madame Lassanne's home, from which three hundred people had been driven into virtual slavery. Nearly all were old—over sixty, some few were boys and girls of fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, and of the old, eighty died in the first six months.

It was a long time now since any news had come through, and those who waited had almost given up hope of seeing their loved ones again.

And we were impotent. With an effort I shook off despondency. I would go and see Madame Leblan and rest a while in her garden. She was lonely and loved a little visit. It would amuse her to hear about the CurÉ and our visit to N.; any gossip would serve to drive away her memories. "Ça change les idÉes," she would say. "It is not well to sit and brood."

Neither is it well to walk and brood; yet here was I, foolish virgin that I was, brooding like a moulting hen. Taking myself firmly in hand, I turned down the rue de L'Étoile and opened the garden gate.

III

Madame was only a poor peasant woman, but she had once been very beautiful, and the old face was handsome still. The aquiline features are well-modelled, the large blue eyes clear and steady, flashing now with a fine pride, now with delicious humour; the head is well poised, she is essentially dignified; there are times when she has the air of a queen.

Her husband is tall and thin, with a drooping moustache, and in accordance with prevailing custom he keeps his hat on in the house, and he is seventy-two and she is seventy, and when I saw her first she was in her quaint little garden sitting under the shade of a mirabelle tree with an ancient dame to whom only Rembrandt could have done justice. Like Madame, she was short and broad, and without being handsome, she was just bonny. She had jolly little eyes and a chubby, dimpled face, and wore a spotlessly white and befrilled cap with strings that tied under her chin and made you rather want to kiss her. She was just a little coquette in her appearance, and she must have been born in prehistoric times, for she was "la tante de Madame Leblan." She didn't live in the little cottage, she had a room just across the way, and there I would see her sitting in the sun on a fine day as I turned in at the garden gate.

Of course we went down before her, and gave her of our best, for she was an irresistible old thing, who could coax you into cyclonic generosity. She would come trotting over to see us with a small basket on her arm, and having waited till the crowd that besieged our morning hours had melted away, would come upstairs looking so innocent and so picturesque our hearts were as water before her. And then out of the basket would come apples, or pears, or walnuts, with a honeyed phrase, the little vivid eyes searching our own. Refusal was out of the question, we were in the toils, knowing that for Madame we were the sun in the heavens, the down on the wings of the Angel of Life; knowing, too, that surely as she turned away would come the tactful hint, the murmured need. And though periodically we swore that she should have no more, she rarely went empty away.

At last, because of the equality of things, we hardened our hearts. She returned with walnuts. Our thanks being meticulously verbal, she retreated thoughtfully, to reappear a few days later with three pears and a remote malaise that successfully defied diagnosis. We knew she had her eyes on medical comforts, eggs, bons for meat, etc., so the malaise deceived no one, while a cold gift of aspirin tabloids nearly destroyed her faith in humanity.

And all the time she was "rich"! No wonder she was coquette, she could afford to be, for she had small rentes, and money laid by, and had saved all her papers and her bank-book. So Madame Leblan, who had left home with exactly twenty-seven francs in her pocket, told me, but not, loyally enough, until she was sure that our gifts to La Tante had ceased.

She herself never asked for anything, save once, and that was for a paletot for Monsieur. In spite of his three-score-years-and-twelve, in spite of the severe attack of internal hÆmorrhage from which he was recovering, he went to work every morning at six, returning at six at night. Hard manual toil it was, too, much too hard for a man of his years. How Madame fretted over him! How she scraped and saved to buy him little comforts. And he did need that coat badly. I think I shall never forget her face when she saw the warm Cardigan jacket the Society provided for him. Her eyes filled with tears, she flushed like a girl, she looked radiantly beautiful and then, with the most gracious diffidence in the world, "You will permit me?" she said, and drew my face down to hers.

There was something about that old creature that made me feel ashamed. What one did was so pitifully little, but she made it seem like a gift of star-flowers bathed in the dews of heaven. It was her unconquerable sense of humour that attracted me to her, I suppose. French wit playing over the fields of life with an indomitable spirit that would not be broken.

When she was a girl her father used to say to her, "You sing too much, some day you will cry," but though the tears did come she never lost her gaiety of heart. When she married she was very poor; Monsieur's father had been foolish, loving wine, and they had to make their own way in the world, but she held her head high and did her best for her boys. It should never be said of them that they were educated at the cow's tail (À la queue des bÊtes). Her pride came to her aid, and perhaps much of her instinctive good breeding too. Le fils in the Garde Republicaine in Paris has much of his mother's manner.

Leaving the cottage was a terrible wrench. They packed a few odds-and-ends into a bundle, and she tidied everything, saying farewell to the little treasures they had collected in forty-odd years. Silently they locked the doors behind them, her eyes dry, the catastrophe too big for tears. But in the garden Monsieur paused. "Les bÊtes," he said; "we mustn't leave them to starve. Open the cow-house door and let them go free." As she turned to obey him her feet faltered, the world swam in a mist of tears. She thrust the key blindly into his hands and stumbled like a drunken woman down the road.

Then for six weeks they trudged together. They slept in fields, in the woods, under carts, in barns, they were drenched with rain and with dew, they were often hungry and thirsty and cold. But they struggled on until they came to Vavincourt, and there the owner of the little house in Bar met them, and seeing what manner of people they were, lent it to them rent free on condition that they looked after the garden. How grateful Madame was, but how intensely she longed for home! How wistfully she turned her eyes northward across the hills! How often the question, When? trembled half spoken on her lips! What mattered it that home was a ruin and she penniless? Just to be in the valley again, to see the sun gleaming on the river.

To help the time to pass less sluggishly by we had invented a little tale, a tale of which I was the unworthy heroine, and the hero an unknown millionaire. The millionaire with gold jusqu'au plafond, who was obligingly waiting for me beyond the sea, and who would come some day and lay his heart, his hand, and his gold-mine at my feet. And then a petit palais would spring miraculously from that much-loved rubbish-heap at VÉry, and one day as Madame and le patron stood by the door, they would see a great aeroplane skimming through the sky, it would swoop and settle, and from it would leap the millionaire and his blushing bride. And Madame would lead them in and give them wine and coffee and a salad and saucissons de Lorraine, which are better and more delicious than any other saucissons in all the wide world.

Only a foolish little story, but when one is old and one's heart is weary it is good to be foolish at times, good to spin the sun-kissed webs, good to leave the dark chamber of despair and stray with timid feet over the gleaming meadows of hope.

Her greeting rarely varied. "Je vous croyais morte," a reproach for the supposed infrequency of my visits. She cried it now, though scarcely a week had sped since I saw her last, and then with mysterious winks and nods she hobbled into the house, to return a few minutes later with two or three bunches of grapes and some fine pears. "Pendant la guerre tous les scellÉs sont levÉs,"[6] she laughed, but I knew she had not robbed her benefactor. The fruit she kept en cachette for us, she and M. Leblan deprived themselves of, nor could any remonstrance on our part stay her.

"Where is your basket?" She had ordered me to bring one on my next visit, yet here was I, most perplexingly without. But the fruit must be carried home. She had no basket, no paper. MÉchante that I was, to come without that basket. Had not she, Madame, commanded it? In vain I refused the gift. She was inexorable.

"Ah, I have it." She seized me with delighted hands, and it was then that the uniform earned my bitterest reproach, for into its pockets, whose size suggested that they were originally intended to hold the guano and rabbits of agricultural relief, went the pears. One might as well argue with a megatherium as with Madame when her mind was made up. So I had to stand in the kitchen growing bulkier and bulkier, with knobs and hillocks and boulders and tussocks sprouting all over me, feeling like a fatted calf, and longing for kindly darkness to swallow me up. Subsequently I slunk home by unfrequented ways, every yard of which seemed to be adorned with a gendarme taking notes. I am convinced that I escaped arrest and decapitation only by a miracle, and that every dog in the town bayed at my heels.

My agonies, needless to say, met with scant sympathy from my companions. They accused me of flirting with M. Leblan, even while they dug greedy teeth into the pears, an accusation it was difficult to refute when he called at the house one evening and, hearing that I was out, refused to leave a message, but turned up later and demanded an interview with such an air of mystery Madame came to call me fluttering so we thought the President of the Republic must be at the door.

Still more difficult was it to refute when Monsieur had gone away, leaving me transfixed on the stairs with two huge bottles of mirabelle plums in my hands. I never dared to tell the three villains who made life such a happy thing on the Boulevard de la Rochelle that Monsieur was wont to say that if only he were twenty years younger he ... he.... Can you guess what he?...

Madame did. She knew, and used to tease me about it. She is one of the few people in the world who know that I still can blush! Do you? No? Ah, but then you have never seen Monsieur! You have never heard him say what he ... what he ... well, you know what he....

There were no dark thoughts in my mind as I sped circuitously homewards, skimming down a by-street every time a gendarme loomed in view; I was thinking of Madame and of the twinkle in her eyes when she talked of le patron, and of the long day spent at N., the story of which had helped to drive away for the moment the most persistent of her idÉes noires.