STORM-WRACK FROM VERDUN

I

"The French are evacuating some villages near Verdun, and I hear there are a number of refugees at the MarchÉ Couvert to-night," one of the coterie remarked as she came in one evening from her rounds. It seemed a little odd that villages should be evacuated by the French just then, but we had long since ceased to be surprised at anything. In the War Zone everything is possible and the unexpected is the probable, so we piled on waterproofs and goloshes and woollies, for it was a cold, wet night, and set forth in all our panoply of ugliness for the Covered Market.

The streets were as dark as the pit, only a pale cold gleam showing where the river lay. The sky was heavily overcast, a keen wind cut down from the north. The pavement on the quay was broken and rough, we splashed into pools, we jolted into crevasses, we bent our heads to the whistling storm, we reached the market at last. The wide gates were open, and the vast floor, with its rows of empty stalls, loomed like a vault before us. The heavy, sickly odour of stale vegetables, of sausage and of meat, of unaired space where humanity throngs on several days a week clutched at us as we went in. We were to become very familiar with it in the weeks that followed—weeks during which it daily grew heavier, sicklier, more nauseating, more horrible.

On the left of the market as you enter from the quay there is a broad wooden staircase which leads to a still broader wooden gallery that runs right round the building. At the top we turned to the right. The gallery was dimly lighted, dark figures huddled on it here and there; we crossed the lower end and found ourselves in a wide space, really a large unenclosed room which had been hastily improvised as a kitchen. A short counter divided it into two very unequal portions, in the smaller being some old armoires, two large steamers or boilers, a table piled with plates, dishes and small and handleless bowls, used instead of cups. Another littered with glasses, and in the corner a big barrel of wine.

Two or three women were probing the contents of the boilers; men rushed excitedly about, one was chopping bread, another filling jugs with wine, a garde-champÊtre with a hoarse voice was shouting unintelligible orders, a gendarme or two hung about getting in everybody's way, and in the outer space seethed a mob of men, women and children in every condition of dishevelment, mud, misery and distress. Five or six long tables with benches of the light garden-seat variety crossed this space. Seated as tightly as they could be squeezed together were more refugees devouring a steaming soup. Everything wore an air of confusion; the light was bad, one paraffin lamp swaying dimly over the scene. We saw a door, guarded by two officials, garde-champÊtres, or something of the kind; we passed through, and there we saw a sight which I am convinced no one of us will ever forget.

Picture an enormous room, like a barrack dormitory. There are windows—some five or six—on each side. Half-way down and opposite one another there are two stoves in which good fires are burning. The glow from the open doors falls on the gloom and throws into relief the stooped figures, broken with fatigue, that cluster dejectedly round them. A lamp throws fitful shadows. The air is brown. Perhaps you think this an absurd thing to say, but it was so. It hung like a pale brown veil over the room, and as weeks went by the colour deepened, and in breathing it one had the sensation of drawing something solid into one's lungs. It smelt, too, with an indescribable smell that became intensified every day, until at last a time came when it required a definite effort to penetrate it. It seemed to hurl you back from the doorway; you began to think it must be sentient. It was certainly stifling, poisonous, foetid, and as I write I seem to feel it in my nostrils again, seem to feel the same nausea that seized us when we breathed it then. Over all the floor-space there is straw, thick, tossed-up straw, through which, running past the stoves, are two narrow lanes, one down either side. And on the straw lie human beings, not many as yet, only those who have supped, or who, waiting for the meal, have thrown themselves down in the last stages of physical and mental exhaustion. Babies wail, women are sobbing, the gardes-champÊtres shout in rough voices. Bales, bundles, hand-grips, baskets lie on the straw; there an old woman is lying wretchedly, her head on a canvas bag; here two boys are sprawling across one another in heavy, uncouth, abandoned attitudes.

We go about among the people talking to them, but they are dazed and weary. Did we learn that night that the great attack upon Verdun had begun, or did we only know of it some days later? So packed with incident were those first days I cannot remember, but it seems to me now that knowledge came later, and that we came home that night wondering, questioning, our hearts filled with pity for those we had left homeless upon that awful straw.

We came again into the outer room. More refugees were arriving, little groups of bewildered creatures, muddy, travel-stained, dog-weary, yet wonderfully patient and resigned. There are no sanitary arrangements of any kind in the building, there is not a basin, nor a towel, nor a cake of soap of which the refugees can make use.

The next evening we go again, supposing that the evacuation must be complete, that this river of human misery will cease to flow through the town, but little by little we realise that it is only beginning.

Days lengthen into weeks, and still the refugees come through. We know now that Verdun is in danger, that the Germans have advanced twelve kilomÈtres; we watch breathlessly for news, the town is listening, intent, anxious, and every day the crowds at the market grow denser. We spend much of our time there now, we have brought over basins, and soap and towels; we have put a table in the inner room, so that those who will may refresh themselves and wash. The rooms are packed. There must be at least three hundred or four hundred people, and still more drift in. Some have been in open cattle trucks for thirty-six hours under rain and snow, for the north wind has become keener and the rain has hardened into fine sleety snow; it is bitterly cold, the roads and streets are awash with mud, women's skirts are soddened to the knee, men are splashed shoulder high. A number of people have fallen ill en route, others, seriously ill, have been compelled to leave their beds and struggle as best they might with the healthy in their rush to safety. We hear that the civil hospital is full, that babies have been born on the journey down—been born and have died and were buried by the way. Despair rides on many a shoulder, fear still darkens many eyes. Some have escaped from a storm of shell-fire, many have had to walk long distances, for the railway lines have been cut. Verdun is isolated—Nixieville is the nearest point to which a train may go—and all have left their homes unguarded, some being already blown to atoms, others momently threatened with a like fate.

In spite of all our anxiety as we made our way to the market that second night, laden with basins and jugs, seaux hygiÉniques, and various other comforts, we could not help laughing. We must have cut funny figures staggering along in the darkness with our uncouth burdens. Happily it WAS dark, and then not happily, as some one trips over an unseen obstacle and is only saved from an ignominious sprawl in the mire by wild evolutions shattering to the nerve. At the market we cast what might be called our "natural feelings" on one side and bored our way into the throng, our strange utensils and luggage desperately exposed to view. Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre! The phrase covers many vicissitudes, but it did not cover the shyest of our coterie when, having deposited her burden on the gallery for a moment in order to help a poor woman, she heard a crash and a round French oath, and turning, beheld a certain official doing a weird cake-walk over things that were never intended to be trodden upon by man. It was the same shy member whose indignation at the lack of proper accommodation bore all her native timidity away and enabled her to persuade the same official to curtain off a small corner at the far end of the gallery and furnish it as a toilet-room for the women, a corner which to our eternal amusement was ever afterwards known as "le petit coin des dames anglaises." However, the petit coin was not in existence for two or three days, and while it was in process of manufacture we were more than once moved to violence of language, though we realised that physical fatigue may reach a point at which, if conditions be unfavourable, no veneer of civilisation can save some individuals from a lapse into primitive ways.

In the inner room the crowd was dense as we struggled in with our apparatus for washing. There was something essentially sordid in the scene. The straw looked dirty, the people were muddier, more wretched. Many were weeping, and very many lying in unrestful contorted attitudes upon the ground. In such a crowd no one dare leave her luggage unguarded, and so it was either gripped tightly to the body, even in sleep, or else was utilised as a pillow. And no one of those who came in by train or camion was allowed to bring more than he or she could carry.

All the misery, all the suffering, all the heart-break of war seemed concentrated there, and then quite suddenly out of ugliness and squalor came beauty. A tall woman with resigned, beautiful face detached herself from the throng, a naked baby wrapped in a towel in her arms. As unconcernedly, as unselfconsciously as if she were at home in her own kitchen she came to the table, filled a basin with warm water, and sitting down, bathed the lusty crowing thing that kicked, and chewed its fists, gurgling with delight.

It was the second time she had been evacuated, she told us. She had seven children, her husband was a farmer and well-to-do. Their home destroyed, they had escaped in August 1914, taking refuge in Verdun, where they had remained, gathering a little furniture together again, trying to make a home once more. She neither wept nor complained. I think she was long past both. Fate had taken its will of her, she could but bow her head, impotent in the storm. Her children, in spite of their experiences, looked neat and clean, they were nicely spoken and refined in manner. Soon the dusky shadows of the room swallowed her up and the human whirlpool swirled round us once more, from it emerging Monsieur B., the "certain official," and his wife who merely came to look round, who made no offer to help, and who must not be confounded with THE Madame B. who was the special providence of our lives.

What Monsieur B. thought when he found us more or less in possession I cannot say, but this I know—that he, in common with every one with whom our work brought us into official contact, showed himself sympathetic, helpful, forbearing and kind. He fell in with suggestions that must have seemed to him quixotic to a degree; he never insinuated, as he might have done, that our activities bordered upon interference, nor did he ask us how English officials would have received French women if the situation had been reversed! At first, thinking, no doubt, that the evacuation was only an affair of two or three days, none of the charitable women of the town thought it necessary to visit the Market, so all the care of the unfortunates was left in the hands of some half-dozen men; but later on, as the stream continued to pour through, and the congestion became more and more acute, many women, some after a hard day's work, came in the evenings and helped to serve the meals. Of course, as soon as they took things in hand we slid into the background, though we found our work just as engrossing and as imperative as ever, but how Madame B. could have walked through those rooms that evening and have gone away without making the smallest effort to ameliorate the conditions baffled our comprehension. However, she added to the gaiety of nations by one remark, so we forgave her. Seeing some respectably-dressed women who had obviously neither washed nor combed for days, we indicated the "washing-stand."

"We are too tired to-night," they said. "In the morning...."

"One would have thought they would have found it refreshing," we murmured to Madame B., who was essaying small talk under large difficulties.

"Ah, yes, I cannot understand it. For me, I wash myself every night, even if I am tired." The exquisiteness of that "mÊme si je suis fatiguÉe" carried us through many a hectic hour.

And hours at the market were apt to be hectic. The serving of meals was a delirium. In vain we begged the guards to keep the door of communication closed, and allow only as many as there was room for at the tables to come to the "dining-room" at a time. They admitted the soundness of the scheme, but they made no attempt to carry it out. Consequently, no sooner was a meal ready than ravenous people poured out in swarms, snatched places at the tables and filled up every inch of space between, ready to fall into a chair the moment it was vacated. We had to elbow, push, worm or drive a way from table to table, from individual to individual; we grew hoarse from shouting "Attention!" We lost time, patience, breath and energy, and meals that might have been served with despatch were a kind of wild scrimmage, through which we "dribbled" with cauldrons of boiling soup or vast platters of meat, with plates piled like the leaning Tower of Pisa—be it written in gold upon our tombstones that the towers never fell—or with telescopic armsful of glasses and bowls. And against us rose not only the solid wall of expectant and famished humanity, but the incoming tide of new arrivals, all of whom had to pass between the tables and the serving counters in order to reach the inner room. Sometimes six hundred had to be fed, sometimes as many as twelve hundred passed through in a day, and—triumph of French organisation—very rarely did supplies run out, very rarely were the big tins of "singe"[10] (which the shy member really supposed was monkey!) brought into play. The meals themselves were excellent. Hot soup from a good pot-au-feu made from beef with quantities of vegetables, then the beef served with its carrots and turnips, leeks, etc., that cooked with it, then cheese or jam, and wine. Coffee and bread in the morning, a three-course meal at midday, another at six—no wonder Bar-le-Duc was eulogised. Never had such a reception been dreamed of. "The food was delicious, excellent.... We shall have grateful memories of Bar."

But the awful sleeping accommodation weighed heavily on our consciences—the brown pall of atmosphere, the foetid SOLID smell, the murky lamp, the fitful glow of the fires, and on the floor on the dirty inadequate straw a dense mass of human beings. Lying in their clothes just as they came from the station, or as they left the big camions in which many were driven down, not daring even to unlace their boots, they were wedged so tightly we thought not even a child could have found space. Some, tossing in their sleep, had flung themselves across neighbours too exhausted to protest; acute discomfort was suggested in every pose; many were sitting up, propped against their bundles; children lay anyhow, a heterogenous mass of arms and legs, or pillowed their heads against their mothers.

"Surely," it was said as we came away, "surely the cup of human misery has never been so full."

Yet we were told the next day that during the night a fresh convoy had come in, and that the garde-champÊtre, tramping up and down the narrow lane in the straw, shouted, "Serrez-vous, serrez-vous," forcing the wretched creatures to be in still closer proximity, to sleep in even greater discomfort.

II

Soon the numbers grew too large for the space, and the long gallery running down from the "dining-room" was converted into a sleeping apartment, a screen of white calico or linen serving as an outer wall. The upper end through which we passed in order to gain access to the original rooms was utilised for meals, a number of tables being brought in and ranged as closely as possible together. Even then the congestion and confusion continued; they were, indeed, an integral part of all MarchÉ Couvert activities, but to our great relief the sleeping quarters were improved. A number of palliasse cases, the gift of a rich woman of the town, were filled with straw, and over most we were able to pin detachable slips made from wheat bags, an immense number of which—made from strong, but soft linen thread—had been offered to us at a moderate price by the Chamber of Commerce acting through the Mayor. Three of these, or four, according to the size required, sewn cannily together made excellent sheets—greatly sought after by the refugees—indeed, we turned them to all kinds of use as time went on. The slips were invaluable now, as, needless to say, the palliasse covers would have been in a disgusting condition in a week, but it was not until the Society presented the new dormitory with twelve iron bedsteads and some camp beds that we felt that Civilisation was lifting up her head again. The beds were placed together at the far end of the dormitory and were primarily intended for sick people or for better-class women who, unable to find a lodging in the town, had to accept the doubtful hospitality of the market. Unhappily there were many of these, and it was heartrending to see women sitting up in the comfortless chairs all night in the cold eating-place rather than face the horror of the straw and the crowded common-room.

Once the beds were installed that contingency no longer arose, though Heaven knows the new apartment was squalid and miserable enough; the beds ranged at the lower end, the palliasses running in close-packed rows by each wall, space enough in the middle to walk between, but no more.

One day we found one of our camp beds at the upper end with a fox-terrier sitting on it, and on inquiry were told that a garde had taken it, evicting two poor old women as he did so. Now we had never intended those beds for lusty officials, so we very naturally protested, but a more than tactful hint reduced us to silence. The gardes had it in their power to make things very unpleasant for us if they felt so inclined; it would be politic to say nothing. Having no official standing, we said nothing. What we thought is immaterial. Later the gendarme was the Don Juan of an incident to which only a Guy de Maupassant could do justice. There, in all that misery, in that makeshift apartment packed with suffering humanity, with children and young girls, with modest and disgusted women looking on, human passions broke through every code of decency and restraint. The scandal lasted for three days, then the woman was sent away.

Meanwhile the news from Verdun was becoming graver. The roads were cut to pieces, motor-cars, gun-carriages, camions were burying themselves axle-deep in the mire; one road impassable, another was made, but by the time the first was repaired the second was a slough. The weather, always in league with the Germans, showed no sign of taking up, wet snow was falling heavily.... "Three more days of this and Verdun must fall."

Soldiers subsequently told us that it was the camion drivers who saved the situation, for they stuck to their wagons day and night, one snatching rest and sleep while another drove. They poured through Bar-le-Duc in hundreds, the roar of traffic thundering down the Boulevard all day long. In the night we would lie awake listening. It sounded like a rough sea dragging back from a stone-strewn shore. Once, if soldier tales be true, "the Boches could have walked into Verdun with their rifles over their shoulders. Four days and four nights we lay in the open, Mademoiselle. Our trenches were blown to pieces, we were cut off by the barrage, we had no food but our emergency rations, no ammunition could reach us. Then our guns became silent. The Boches, thinking it was a ruse, a trap, were afraid to come on. They thought we were reserving fire to mow them down at close quarters, so they waited twelve hours, and during that time our camions brought the ammunition up, and when they did come on we were ready for them."

One lad of twenty, who told me the same tale, was home on leave when I chanced to visit his mother and found the family at lunch. To celebrate his return they were having a little feast—the feast consisting of a tin of sardines and a bottle of red wine, in addition to the usual soup and bread. The boy was a handsome creature, full of life and high spirits, and in no way daunted by experiences that would have tried the nerve of many an older man. He had been buried alive three times, twice by the collapse of a trench, once by that of a dug-out into which he and four others crawled under a storm of shells. "Fortunately I was the first to go in, for a shell burst just outside, ploomb! killed three and wounded one of my companions. The wounded man and I dug and scratched our way out at the back."

He, too, he said, had been without food for four days.

"Weren't you hungry?" his mother asked, but he shook his head.

"One isn't hungry when the copain (pal) on the right is blown to atoms, and the copain on the left is bleeding to death." Then followed casualty details that filled us with horror.

"I saw men go mad up there. They dashed their brains out against walls, they shot themselves. Oh, it was just hell! The shells fell so thick you could hardly put a franc between them—thousands in an hour. The French lost heavily, but the Germans.... I tell you, Mademoiselle, I have seen them climbing over a wall of their own dead that high"—he touched his breast—"to get at us. They came on in close formation, drunk with ether. Oh, yes, it is quite true, we could smell the ether in the French trenches. I have seen the first lines throw away their rifles and link arms as they staggered to attack. Oh, we fauchÉ'd them! But for me, I like the bayonet, you drive it in, you twist it round"—he made an expressive noise impossible to reproduce—"they are afraid of the bayonet, the Boches. Ah, it is fine...."

He is the only man I have ever spoken to who told me he wanted to go back.

Day after day we watched breathlessly for the communiquÉs; evening after evening we went to the market hoping for better news, but there was no lifting as yet in the storm-cloud that hung above the horizon. And still the refugees poured through. We spent the greater part of each day at the market now, snatching meals at odd hours, and turning our hands to anything. We swept floors, we stuffed palliasses with straw—but we don't recommend this as a parlour game—we helped to serve meals, we washed never-diminishing piles of plates and bowls, forks and knives, we put old ladies to bed, we made cups of chocolate for them when they were unable to tackle the pot-au-feu, we chopped mountains of bread and cheese (our hands were like charwomen's), we distributed chocolate and "scarlet stew"—both gifts from the American Relief Committee—we sorted the sheep from the goats at night and—the garde apart—kept the new dormitory select. We became expert in cutting up enormous joints of meat, our implements a short-handled knife invariably coated with grease, a fork when we could get one, and a small wooden board. So expert, indeed, that one day a woman hovered round as we sliced and cut and hacked, watching us intently for some minutes. Then, "Are you a butcher?" she asked. It was an equivocal compliment, but well meant. You see, she was a butcher herself, and I suppose it would have comforted her to talk to one of the fraternity.

And as we slice the turmoil rises round us. A woman sits down to table and bursts into violent uncontrolled weeping; a poor old creature wanders forlornly about, finally making her way past the counter to the boiler where the soup is bubbling. What does she want? "To put some wood on the fire. She is cold, and where is her chair? Some one has taken it away." Her brain has given way under the strain of the last five days and she thinks she is at home. Snatches of conversation float above the din. "It is three days since I have touched hot food." "We slept in the fields last night." "Mais abandonner tout." Tears follow this pathetic little phrase. A man and woman together, both over eighty, white-haired and palsied, stray up to the counter. They cannot eat, they want so very little, just some wine. The woman's skirts drip as she waits; she has fallen into a stream as she fled from the bombardment. They are established in a corner where they mutter and nod, gibberish mostly, for the old man's wits are wandering.

Suddenly the table begins to rock, one end rises convulsively from the ground, plates and dishes begin to slide ominously. An earthquake? Only a great brindled hound that some one tied to the table leg when we were not watching. He lay down, slept happily, smelled dinner, has risen to his majestic height and a wreck is upon us. The table sways more ominously, then Fate, in the shape of the pretty Pre-Raphaelitish femme-de-mÉnage of the market, swoops down upon him and sends him yowling into the crowd, through which he cuts a cataclysmal way. Dogs materialise out of space, we are sometimes tempted to believe. They live desperate lives, are under everybody's feet, appear, and disappear meteor-wise, leaving trails of oaths behind them. A small child plants himself on the floor, and seizing one of these itinerant quadrupeds, tries to make it eat its own tail. The dog prefers to eat the child; a wild skirmish ensues, there are shrieks and yowls that rend the heavens, then a covey of women kick the dog into space, and snatching up the child, carry him to the inner room, where they hold a parliament over him amid a babel of tongues that puts biblical history to shame.

A soldier, mud-stained, down from the trenches, comes to look for his wife; a tall girl in a black straw cart-wheel hat, plentifully adorned with enormous white daisies, flits here and there; a coarse, burly man who has looked on the wine when it is red and who is wearing a peau-de-bicque (goat-skin coat), which I regard with every suspicion, tries to thrust half-a-franc into my hand. Then comes an alarm. The refugees are not told of it, but thirty Taubes are said to be approaching the town. The meal goes on a little more breathlessly, and we carry soup and meat wondering what will happen if the sickening crash comes. But the French avions chase the Germans away.... Late that night I saw the half-witted old woman asleep on the floor, sitting up, her back propped against a child's body, her knees drawn up to her mouth.

III

"There are refugees at the Ferme du Popey too."

Surely there are refugees everywhere! The quarters at the market have long since proved grotesquely inadequate, for not even the "Serrez-vous, serrez-vous" of the garde could pack three people upon floor space for one, so schoolrooms and barrack-rooms were requisitioned elsewhere, and now even the resources of the farm are being drawn upon. The procession of broken, despairing people seemed never-ending. We met them in every street, trailing pitifully through the mire, or leading farm wagons piled high with household goods. Those at the farm had all come down in carts, it was said, many being days on the road, so, thinking we might be of use, we waded out to find the extensive basse-cour a scene of strange confusion.

Soldiers in horizon-blue were cooking food in their regimental kitchens for famished women and children, others were watering horses at the pond; through the archway at the end we could see yet others hanging socks and underlinen upon the fence; beyond ran the canal guarded by its sentinel trees. Wagons filled the yard, men were shouting and talking, officials moved busily here and there. We climbed a glorified ladder to a long, low, straw-strewn loft which was murkily dark, the windows unglazed, being covered by coarse matting which flapped in the wind. Here a number of women were lying or talking in subdued groups while children scrambled restlessly about, the squalor and misery being heartrending. They were leaving immediately, there was nothing to be done, so, having chatted with a few, we went away, telling a harassed official that we were at his service if he had need of us.

A day or two later this offer had strange fruit, for a horde of excited people descended upon the Boulevard, rang at our door, swarmed into the hall and demanded sabots. Now it happened that a short time before a case of sabots had been sent to us by the American Relief Committee (always generous supporters, supplying many a need)—a case so vast that both wings of our front door had to be opened to admit it—so we were able to invite the horde to satisfy its needs. Instantly the hall became a pandemonium. They flung themselves upon the box, they snatched, they grabbed, they chattered in high, shrill voices—Meusienne women of the working-classes generally talk in a strident scream—they tried on sabots, they flung sabots back into the box; in short, they behaved very much as people do behave when their cupidity is aroused and their nervous systems exhausted by an almost unendurable strain.

The commotion, rising in a steady crescendo, had risen forte, fortissimo, when bo-o-om! thud! bo-o-om! bombs began to fall on the town. The clamour in the hall died away, sabots dropped from nerveless fingers. Bo-o-om! The cellar? OÙ est-ce? Some one leads the way, and then, while clamour of another kind seizes the skies, in the icy cellar the mob of half-distraught creatures fall on their knees and chant the Rosary.

As a mist is wiped from a mirror by the passage over it of a cloth, angers, passions, greeds were wiped from their eyes, their voices sank to a quiet murmur. Like children they prayed, and the Holy Spirit brooded for one brief moment over hearts that yearned to God.

Then the raid ended, silence fell on the town, but round the sabot-box, like gulls that scream above a shoal of fish, rapacity swooped and dived, and its voice, sea-gull shrill, bit through the air.