M. LE POILU

I

If you had ventured into Bar-le-Duc during the stormy days of 1916, when the waves of the German ocean beat in vain against the gates of Verdun, you might have thought that the entire French army was quartered there. Soldiers were everywhere. The station-yard was a wilderness of soldiers. In faded horizon-blue, muddy, inconceivably dirty, with that air of je ne sais quoi de fagotÉ which distinguishes them, they simply took possession of the town. The pÂtisseries were packed—how they love cakes, choux-À-la-crÊme, brioches, madeleines, tarts!—the Magasins RÉunis was a tin in which all the sardines were blue and all had been galvanised into life; fruit-shops belched forth clouds that met, mingled and strove with clouds that sought to envelop the vacated space; in the groceries we, who were women and mere civilians at that, stood as suppliants, "with bated breath and whispering humbleness," and generally stood in vain. But for Madame I verily believe we would have starved. Orderlies from officers' messes away up on the Front drove, rode or trained down with lists as long as the mileage they covered, lists that embraced every human need, from flagons of costly scent to tins of herrings or pÂtÉ-de-foie-gras, or Petit Beurre, Lulu (the most insinuating Petit Beurre in the world), from pencils and notepaper to soap, from asparagus and chickens—twelve francs each and as large as a fair-sized snipe—to dried prunes and hair-oil. We even heard of one popotte which pooled resources and paid twenty-five francs for a lobster, but perhaps that tale was merely offered as a tax upon our credulity.

Bar-le-Duc was delirious. Never had it known such a reaping, never had it heard of such prices. It rose dizzily to an occasion which would have been sublime but for the inhumanity of the Petite Vitesse which, lacking true appreciation of the situation, sat down upon its wheels and ceased to run.

Not that the Petite Vitesse was really to blame. It yearned to indulge in itinerant action, but there was Verdun, with its gargantuan mouths wide open, all waiting to be fed, and all clamouring for men, munitions and ravitaillement of every kind. In those days all roads led to Verdun—all except one, and that the Germans were hysterically treading.

However, we wasted no sympathy on the shopkeepers. Their complete indifference to our needs drove every melting tenderness from our hearts, or, to be quite accurate, drove it in another direction—that of the poor poilu who had no list and no fat wallet bulging with hundred-franc notes. And I think he richly deserved all the sympathy we could give him. Think of the streets as I have described them when talking of the MarchÉ Couvert, call to mind every discomfort that weather can impose, add to them, multiply them exceedingly, and then extend them beyond the farthest bounds of reason, and you have Bar in the spring of 1916. Cold, wet, snow, sleet, slush, wind, mud, rain—interminable rain—did their worst with us, and in them all and under most soldiers lived in the streets. The dÉbitants and cafÉ-restaurants were closed during a great part of the day, there was literally nowhere for them to go. They huddled like flocks of draggled birds in the station-yard, some in groups, some in serried mass before the barrier, some stamping up and down, some sitting on the kerb or on the low stone parapet from which the railings spring, and while some, pillowing their heads on their kits, went exhaustedly to sleep, others crouched with their backs against the wall. They ate their bread, opened their tins of conserve—generally potted meat or sardines—sliced their cheese with a pocket-knife, or absorbed needed comfort from bottles which, for all their original dedication, were rarely destined to hold water! On the Canal bank they sat or lay in the snow, on ground holding the seeds of a dozen chilly diseases in its breast; on the river banks they sprang up like weeds, on the Boulevard every seat had its quota, and we have known them to have it for the night. In all the town there was not a canteen or a foyer, not a hut nor a camp, not a place of amusement (except a spasmodic cinema), not a room set apart for their service. They might have been Ishmaels; they must have been profoundly uncomfortable.

Yet no one seemed to realise it. That was the outstanding explosive feature of the case. Late in the spring, towards the end of April or in May, buffets were opened in the station-yard under the Ægis of the Croix Rouge. At one of these ham, sardines, bread, post cards, tobacco, chocolate, cakes, matches, pÂtÉ, cheese, etc., could be bought; at the other wine, and possibly beer. The space between was not even roofed over, and, their small purchases made, the men had to consume them—when eatable—in the open. But of real solicitude, in the British sense of the word, for their comfort there was none.

France has shown herself mighty in many ways during the war, but—with the utmost diffidence I suggest it—not in her care for the men who are waging it. Our Tommies, with their Y.M.C.A. huts and Church Army and Salvation huts, with their hot baths, their sing-songs in every rest-camp, their clouds of ministering angels, their constellations of adoring satellites waiting on them hand and foot, are pampered minions compared with the French soldier. For him there is neither Y.M.C.A., Church Army nor Salvation Army. He comes, some three thousand of him, en repos to a tiny village, such as Fains or Saudrupt, TrÉmont or Bazincourt, he is crowded into barns, granges, stables and lofts, he is route-marched by day, he is neglected by evening. No one worries about him. Amusement, distraction there is none. No club-room where he may foregather comfortably, no cheery canteen with billiards and games, no shops in which if he has money he can spend it. Blank, cheerless, uncared-for nothingness. He gets into mischief—what can you expect? He goes back to the trenches, and shamed eyes are averted and hearts weighed with care hide behind bravado as he goes.

Sometimes you hear, "The men are so weary and so dispirited they do no harm." They are like dream people, moving through a world of shadows. Those who go down into hell do not come back easily to the things of earth. Sometimes you hear tales that make you wince. The pity of it! And sometimes you meet young girls who, tempted beyond their strength, are paying the price of a sin whose responsibility should rest on other shoulders.

"My friend the Aumonier at F—— does not know what to do with his men," said the AbbÉ B. to me one day. "They are utterly discouraged, he cannot rouse them; they vow they will not go back to the trenches." And then he talked of agitators who tried to stir up disaffection in the ranks, Socialist leaders and the like. (France has her Bolos to meet even in the humblest places.) But I could not help thinking that the good Aumonier's task would have been a lighter one had plenty of wholesome recreation been provided for his men in that super-stupid, dull and uninteresting village of F——.[11]

The migratory soldier going to or from leave, or changing from one part of the Front to another, might, as we have seen, wait hours at a junction, cold and friendless, without where to lay his head. And just why it was not particularly easy to discover. We divined a psychological problem, we never really resolved it.

Does logic, carried to its ultimate conclusion, leave humanity limping behind it on the road?

Or are the French the victims of their own history? Did not the Revolution sow the seeds of deep distrust between aristocracy and bourgeoisie and, more than that, sow an even deeper distrust between bourgeois and bourgeois? During the Reign of Terror the man who dined with you to-night all too often betrayed you on the morrow, neighbour feared neighbour, and with terrible justification, the home became a fortress round which ran a moat of silence and reserve, the family circle became the family horizon, people learned to live to themselves, to mind their own business and let the devil or who would mind that of their neighbours.

When England was blossoming in a springtime of altruism, when great-minded men and women were learning that the burden of the poor, the sick, the suffering was their burden to be shouldered and carried and passed from hand to hand, France was still maimed and battered by blows from which she has scarcely yet recovered.

Even to-day French women tell me of the isolation of their upbringing. "Our father discouraged intercourse with the families about us."

But that narrow individualism—or, more properly, tribalism—is, I think, dying out, and the present war bids fair to give it its death-stroke.

Behind the Revolution lay no fine feudal instinct, no traditions save those of bitter hatred and of resentment on the one hand, of contempt and oppression on the other. Not, it will be acknowledged, the best material out of which to reconstitute a broken world. And so what might be called collective sympathy was a feeble plant, struggling pitifully in unfavourable soil. The great upper class which has made England so peculiarly what she is scarcely existed in France. The old aristocracy passed away, the new sprang from the Napoleonic knapsack; Demos in a gilt frame, a Demos who had much to forget and infinitely more to learn.

Some philanthropic societies, of course, existed before the war, but, so far as my knowledge of them goes, they were run by the State or by its delegates, the iron hand of officialdom closed down upon them, they made little if any claim upon the heart of the people. Perhaps in a nation of such indomitable independence no more was necessary, but what was necessary—if I may dare to say so—was large-hearted sympathy and understanding between class and class—a common meeting-ground, in fact.

So, at least, I read the problem, and offer you my solution for what it is worth, uncomfortably aware that wiser heads than mine may laugh me out of court and sentence me to eternal derision.

One thing, at least, I do not wish, and that is to bring in a verdict of general inhumanity and hard-heartedness against the French nation. A certain imperceptiveness, lack of intuition, of insight, of the sympathetic imagination—call it what you will—is, perhaps, theirs in a measure; but, on the other hand, the individual responds quickly, even emotionally, to an appeal to his softer side. Only he has not acquired the habit of exposing his soft side to view and asking the needy to lean upon it! Nor has he acquired the habit of going forth to look for people ready to lean. He accepts the status quo. But prove to him that it needs altering, and he is with you heart and hand. His is an attitude of mind, not of heart. When the heart is touched the mind becomes its staunchest ally. The feeding of the refugees done on lavish scale, the installation of a hostel for the relatives of men dying in hospital are instances of what I mean. For months, years, poor women, wives and mothers coming to take their last farewell of those who gave their lives for France, had no welcome in Bar. All too often they were unable to find a bed, they wandered the streets when the hospitals were closed against them, they slept in the station. Then a MÉdicin-Chef, with a big heart and reforming mind, suggested that the refugee dormitories in the market should be converted into a hostel. No sooner suggested than done. The "Maison des Parents" sprang into life, a tiny charge was made for le gÎte et la table, voluntary helpers served the meals, organised, catered, kept the accounts. France only needs to be shown the way. One day she will seek it out for herself. Every day she is finding new roads. And this I am sure every one who has worked as our Society has done will endorse, no appeal has ever been made in vain to those who, like our friends in Bar-le-Duc and elsewhere, gave with unstinting generosity and without self-advertisement.

II

Think, too, of the hospitals. The call of the wounded was answered magnificently. Remember that before the war French hospitals were very much where ours were in the days of Mrs. Gamp, and before Florence Nightingale carried her lamp through their dark and noisome places. It is said that the nursing used to be done by nuns for the most part, a fact of which the Government took no cognisance when it drove the religious orders from the country, and when they went away it fell into the hands of riff-raff. Women of no character, imported by students as worthless as themselves, masqueraded as ministering angels, and it is safe to assume that they neither ministered nor were angelic. Gentlewomen, even the petit bourgeoisie, drew their skirts aside from such creatures. The woman of good birth and education who became a nurse, not only violated her code by earning her living, but cut her social cables and drifted out upon an almost uncharted sea. Only the few who were brave enough to attempt it trained (if my authorities are reliable) in England, and no doubt it was owing in large measure to them that a movement for re-organising the hospitals was set on foot. But before the project could mature the church bells, ringing out their call to arms, rang out a call to French women too, and gathered them into the nursing profession.

Perhaps that is why the hale, hearty, often dirty, and by no means always respectful poilu has been neglected. Woman seeing him wounded had no eye for him whole. Besides, he is rather a bewildering thing; his gods are not her gods, his standards not her standards, she is—dare I whisper it?—just a little afraid of him, as we are apt to be of the thing we do not understand. All her instinct has bidden her banish him from her orbit, but insensibly, inevitably he is beginning to move in it, to worm himself in. Wounded, she has him at her mercy, and when, repaired, patched and nursed into the semblance of a man again, he goes back to the trenches surely she can never think of him in the old way, or look at him from the old angle? As your true democrat is at heart a complete snob, the poor poilu used to be, and is probably to a large extent still, looked down upon as an inferior being. Conscription rubbed the hero from him, but the human being is beginning to emerge.

It is possible that in the hospitals another revolution is taking place which, if unseen and unguessed at, may be scarcely less far-reaching in its effects than the old. It has at least drawn the women outside the charmed circle of the home, it is bringing them hourly into contact with a side of life which, but for the war, might have remained a closed book whose pages they would always have shrunk from turning. Such close contact with human agony, endurance and death cannot leave them unmoved, and though they have not yet thoroughly mastered the knack of making hospitals HOMES, though many little comforts, graces and refinements that we think essential are missing, still, when one remembers the overwhelming ignorance with which they began and the difficulties they had to contend with, we must concede that they have done wonders. For, unlike our V.A.D.s, they did not step into up-to-date, well-appointed wards with lynx-eyed sisters, steeped in the best traditions, waiting to instruct them. Experience was their teacher. They were amateurs doing professional work, and without discredit to them we may sympathise with the soldiers who, transferred from a hospital under British management to one run by their own compatriots, wept like children. Which shows that though we may deny him the quality, the poilu appreciates and is grateful for a good dose of judicious petting.

III

Yes! The poilu deserves our sympathy. He is, to my mind, one of the most tragic figures of the war. He is pursued by a fatalism as relentless as it is hopeless, and whether he is ill or well is subjected to much unnecessary discomfort. He hates war, he hates the trenches, he loathes the life of the trenches, he wants nothing so much in the world as his own hearthstone. He is often despairing, and convinced of defeat. ("Mademoiselle, never can we drive the Boche from his trenches, never!") and yet he goes on. There lies the hero in him—he goes on. Not one in a hundred of him has Tommy's cheery optimism, unfailing good-humour, cheerful grumble and certainty of victory. And yet he goes on! He sings L'Internationale, he vows in regiments that "on ne marchera plus. C'est fini"—but he goes on. He is really rather wonderful, for he has borne the brunt of heavy fighting for more than three years, and behind him is no warm barrage of organised care, of solicitude for his welfare, or public ministration to shield him from the devils of depression and despair. His wife, his sister, his mother may pinch and starve to send him little comforts, but he is conscious of the pinching, he has not yet got the great warm heart of a generous nation at his back. Think of his pay, of his separation allowances (those of the refugees, one franc twenty-five per day per adult, fifty centimes per day per child), and then picture him fighting against heavy odds, standing up to and defying the might of Germany at Verdun. Isn't he wonderful?

He seems to have no hope of coming through the war alive. In canteen, in the train, in the kitchens of the refugees you may hear him say, "At Verdun or on the Somme, what matter? It will come some time, and best for those to whom it comes quickly."

"Ceux qui cherchent la mort ne la trouve jamais." The speaker was a quick, vivid thing, obviously not of the working classes. He had been citÉ (mentioned) more than once, and offered his stripes with a view to a commission several times, but had always refused them. "For me, I do not mind, but think of the responsibility ... to know that the lives of others hung upon you, your coolness, quickness, readiness of decision. Impossible! And it is the sergeants who die. The mortality among them is higher than in any other rank. They must expose themselves more, you see.... Oh yes, there are men who are afraid, and there are men who try to die." It was then he added, "But those who seek death never find it. The man who hesitates, who peers over the top of the trench, who looks this way and that, wondering if the moment is good, he gets killed; but the man who is not afraid, the man who wants to die, he rushes straight out, he rushes straight up to the Boche ... he is never hurt."

And then he and his companion talked of men who longed to die, who courted death but in vain. Both expressed a quiet, unemotional conviction that Death would come to them before long. And both wore the Croix de Guerre.

Old Madame Leblan—you remember her?—had a nephew whom she loved as a son. He and her own boys had grown up together, and she would talk to me of Paul by the hour. He saw all the Verdun fighting, and before that much that was almost as fierce; he visited her during every leave, he brought her and her family gifts, napkin-rings, pen-handles, paper-cutters, finger-rings, all sorts of odds and ends made in the trenches from shell-cases and the like. He was always cheery, always sure he would come again. Paul was like a breeze of sunny wind, he never lost heart, he never lost hope—until they gave him his commission. He refused it over and over again. Then his Colonel, taxing him with want of patriotism, forced him to accept it. That week he wrote to Madame. He told her of his promotion, adding, "In a fortnight I shall get leave, so I am looking forward to seeing you all, unless...."

She showed me the letter. She pointed to that significant "unless...."

"Never have I known Paul to write like that. Always he said I will come." Her heart was full of foreboding, and next time I saw her she took out the letter with shaking hands. Paul was dead.

"He knew," she said, as she wept bitterly; "he knew when he took his commission."

A reconnaissance from which all his men got back safely, Paul last of all, crawling on hands and knees ... raises himself to take a necessary observation ... a sniper ... a swift bullet ... a merciful death ... and an old heart bleeding from a wound that will never heal.

"If we see Death in front of us we care no more for it than we do for that." A Zouave held a glass of lemonade high above the canteen counter. "For that is the honour of the regiment. Death?" he shrugged. "One will die, sans doute. At Verdun, on the Somme, n'importe! My copain here has been wounded twice. And I? I had two brothers, they are both in your cemetery here. Yes, killed at Verdun, M'amzelle; I was wounded. Some day I suppose that we, nous aussi...." Again he shrugged. "Will you give me another lemonade?"

He and his companion wore the fourragÈre, the cord of honour, given to regiments for exceptional gallantry in the field. They had been at Vaux. And what marvels of endurance and sheer pluck the Zouaves exhibited there are matters now of common knowledge. Personally, I nourish a calm conviction that but for them and their whirlwind sacrifice Verdun must have fallen.

IV

Fatalists? Yes. But a thousand other things besides. It is useless to try and offer you the poilu in tabloid form, he refuses to be reduced to a formula. The pessimist of to-day is the inconsequent child of to-morrow. You pity him for his misfortunes, and straightway he makes you yearn to chastise him for his impertinence. His manners—especially in the street—like the Artless Bahdar's, "are not always nice." He can be, and all too often is, frankly indecent; indeed there are hours when you ask yourself wildly whether indecency is not just a question of opinion, and whether standards must shift when frontiers are crossed, and a new outlook on life be acquired as diligently and as open-mindedly as one acquires—or strives to!—a Parisian accent.

It is, of course, in the canteen that he can be studied most easily. There you see him in all his moods, and there you need all your wits about you if you are not to be put out of court a hundred times a day. Canteens are, as we have seen, accidental luxuries on the French front. They took root in most inhospitable soil. As happy hunting-grounds for the pacifists and anti-war agitators they were feared, their value as restoratives (I speak temperamentally, not gastronomically) being practically unknown. But once known it was recognised. The canteen at Bar-le-Duc, for instance, has been the means of opening up at least two others, though the opinion of one General, forcibly expressed when it was in process of installation, filled its promoters with darkest gloom.

"There will not be an unsmashed bowl, cup or plate in a week. The men will destroy everything." And therein proved himself a false prophet, for the men destroyed nothing—except our faith in that General's knowledge of them!

Once, indeed, we did see them in unbridled mood, and many and deep were the complications that followed it. It was New Year's Eve, and as I crossed the station yard I could hear wild revelry ascending to the night. (Perhaps at this point it would be as well to say that the canteen was not run by or connected in any way with our Society, and that I and two members of the coterie worked there as supernumeraries in the evenings when other work was done. The fourth and by no means last member was one of the fairy godmothers whose magic wand had waved it into being.) Going in, I found it as usual in a fog of smoke, and thronged with men. Now precisely what befell it would take too long to relate, but I admit you to some esoteric knowledge. The evening, for me, began with songs sung in chorus, passed swiftly to solos which blistered the air, and which would have been promptly silenced had not Authority warned us "to leave the men alone, they are in dangerous mood to-night." (A warning with which one helper, at least, had no sympathy.) It may safely be assumed that there was much in those songs which we did not understand, but, judging by what we did, ignorance was more than bliss, it was the topmost pinnacle of discretion.

The soloist hoarse (he should have had a megaphone, so terrific was the din), his place was taken by a creature so picturesque that all my hearts went out to him at once. (It is as well to take a few hundred with you when you go to France, they have such a trick of mislaying themselves.) He was tall and slender, finely made, splendidly poised, well-knit, a graceful thing with finished gestures, and he wore a red fez, wide mustard-coloured trousers and a Zouave coat. He was singularly handsome with chiselled features and eyes of that deep soft brown that one associates with the South. Furthermore, he possessed no mean gift of oratory.

He stood on the bench that did duty as a platform. Jan Van Steen might have painted the canteen then, or would he have vulgarised it? In spite of everything, in some indefinable way it was not vulgar, and yet we instinctively felt that it ought to have been. What saved it? Ah, that I cannot tell. Perhaps the dim light, or the faint blueish haze of tobacco smoke, the stacked arms, trench-helmets hanging on the walls. Or else that wonderful horizon-blue, a colour that is capable of every artistic nuance, that lures the imagination, that offers a hundred beauties to the eye, and can resolve itself as exquisitely against the dark boarding of a canteen as against the first delicate green of spring, or against autumn woods a riot of colour.

Now the speech of that graceless creature, swaying lightly above the crowd, was everything that a canteen or war-time speech ought not to be. It began with abuse of capitalists—well, they deserved it, perhaps. It taxed them with all responsibility for the war, it yearned passionately to see them in the trenches. There, at least, we were in accord. We know a few.... But when it went on to say that the masses who fought were fools, that they should "down tools," that the German is too rich, too powerful, too well-organised, too supreme a militarist ever to be defeated.... Then British pride arose in arms.... Just what might have happened I cannot say, for French pride arose too, and as it rose the orator descended, and holy calm fell for a moment upon the raging tumult.

It was indeed a hectic evening, and I, for one, was hoarse for two days after it. Even "Monsieur dÉsire?" or "Ça fait trente-trois sous, Monsieur," was an exercise requiring vocal cords of steel or of wire in such a hubbub, and mine, alas! are of neither.

But the descent of the orator was not the end. Somehow, no matter how, it came to certain ears that the canteen that night had been the scene of an "orgy," the reputation of France was at stake, and so it befell that one afternoon when the thermometer sympathetically registered twenty-two degrees of frost, Colonel X. interviewed those of us who had assisted at the revels, separately one by one, in the little office behind the canteen. He wanted, it seems, to find out exactly what had happened. Well, he found out!

Put to the question, "Colonel X.," quoth I, not knowing the enormity I was committing, "the men had drunk a little too much."

"But, Mademoiselle," his dignity was admirable, reproof was in every line of his exquisitely-fitting uniform, "soldiers of France are never drunk."

"Then"—this very sweetly—"can you tell me where they get the wine?"

And he told me! He ought to have shot me, of course, and no doubt I should richly have deserved it. But inadvertently I had touched upon one of his pet grievances. The military authorities can close the dÉbitants and restaurants, but they cannot close the Épiceries.

"Every grocer in France," he cried, "can get a license to sell wine. He sends a small boy—un vrai gosse—to the Bureau, he stamps a certificate, he pays a few francs, and that is all. A soldier can fill his bottle at any grocer's in the town. Why," he went on, the original cause of our interview forgotten and the delinquent turned confidante, "not long ago I entrained a regiment here sober, Mademoiselle, I assure you sober, but when they arrived at R—— they were drunk. And the General was furious. 'What do you mean by sending me drunken soldiers?' he thundered. They had filled their bottles, they were thirsty in the train...."

But officially, you understand, soldiers of France are never drunk. Actually they seldom are. Coming home after six months in Bar, I saw more soldiers under the influence of drink in a week (it included a journey to Ireland in a train full of ultra-cheerful souls) than in all my time in France. That men who were far from sober came occasionally to the canteen cannot be denied, there are rapscallions in every army, but the percentage was small, and with twenty-two degrees of frost gnawing his vitals there is excuse for the man who solaces himself with wine.

V

It was characteristic of the French mind that Colonel X. could not understand why we did not call the station guard and turn the rioters into the street. To wander about in that bitter wind, to get perhaps into all sorts of trouble! Better a rowdy canteen a hundred times over.

We were frank enough—at least I know I was—on that aspect of the episode, and, all honour to him, he conceded a point though he failed to understand its necessity. But now, as at so many pulsating moments of my career, the ill-luck that dogs me seized me in the person of the Canteen-Chief and removed me from the room. She, poor ignorant dear, thought I was being indiscreet, whereas I was merely being receptive. I am sure I owe that Canteen-Chief a grudge, and I HOPE the Colonel thinks he does, but on that point his discretion has been perfect.

Only in the very direst extremity would we have called in the station guard. We knew the deep-seated animosity with which the soldier views the gendarme. I may be wrong, but my firm impression is that he hates him even more than, or quite as much, as he hates the Boche. I suppose because he does not fight. There must be something intensely irritating to a war-scarred soldier in the sight of a strapping, well-fed, comfortable policeman. You know the story of the wounded Tommy making his way back from the lines and being accosted by a red-cap?

"'Some' fight, eh?" he inquired blandly.

"Some don't," retorted Tommy, and that sums the situation up more neatly than a volume of explanation.

Once, after the Walpurgis Night, a man chose to be noisy and slightly offensive in the canteen. It was a thing that rarely happened, and could always be dealt with, but, smarting possibly under a reprimand, the guard rushed in, seized a quiet, inoffensive, rather elderly man who was meekly drinking his coffee, and in spite of remonstrances and protestations in which the canteen-workers joined, dragged him off, cutting his throat rather badly with a bayonet in the scuffle. A little incident which in no way inclined us to lean for support, moral or otherwise, upon the guardians of military law. But we gave them their coffee or chocolate piping hot just the same.

And there were weeks when hot drinks were more acceptable than would have been promise of salvation.

"Bien chaud" ("Very hot") they would cry, coming in with icicles on their moustaches and snow thick on their shoulders. Once an officer asked for coffee.

"Very hot, please."

"It is boiling, Monsieur." He gulped it down.

"It is the first hot food I have tasted for fourteen days."

"From Vaux?" we asked.

"Yes, front line trenches. Everything frozen, the wine in the wine-casks solid. Yes, another bowl, please."

Once another officer came in accompanied by an older man whom we thought must be his father. He begged for water.

"It comes straight from the main tap, it is neither filtered nor boiled," we told him.

"N'importe." No, he would not have tea nor coffee. Water, cold water. He had a raging, a devouring thirst. A glass was filled and given him.

"Suppose Monsieur gets typhoid?"

"He has it now," the elderly man replied. "His temperature is high, that is why he has so great thirst." The patient drank another glass. Then they both went away. We often wondered whether he recovered.

Once, at least, our hearts went out to another sick man. He leaned against the counter with pallid face, over which the sweat of physical weakness was breaking. Questioned, he told us he had just been discharged from hospital, he was going back to the trenches, to Verdun, in the morning. He looked as if he ought to have been in his bed. I wonder if any society exists in France with the object of helping such men? We never heard of one (which by no means proves that it does not exist), but oh, how useful it might have been in Bar! One morning, for instance, a man tottered into the canteen, ordered a cup of coffee, drank, laid his head down on the table and fell into a stupefied doze. So long did he remain the canteeners became anxious. Presently he stirred, and told them that he had come there straight from a hospital, that he was going home on leave, that his home was far—perhaps two days' journey—away, and he had not a sou in his pocket. He was by no means an isolated case. As a packet of food was being made up for him, a soldier, obviously a stranger to the sick man, ordered deux oeufs sur-le-plat."

"They are not for myself," he said, "but for the pal here." A little act of good comradeship that was by no means the only one of its kind.

The moment which always thrilled was that in which a regimental Rothschild treated his companions to the best of our store. How eagerly and exhaustively the list of boissons was studied!

"Un cafÉ? C'est combien? Deux sous? ce n'est pas cher Ça." Then to a friend, "Qu'est-ce-que-tu-prends?"

"Moi? je veux bien un cafÉ."

"No, non, un chocolat. C'est trÈs bon le chocolat." The coffee lover wavers.

"Soit. Un chocolat alors." Then some one else cannot make up his mind. A bearded man pouring bouillon down his throat recommends that. It is excellent. The merits of soup are discussed. Then back they go to coffee again, and all the time as seriously as if the issue of the war depended upon their deliberations. At length, however, a decision is made—not without much pleading for gniolle (rum) on the part of Rothschild. "A drop? Just a tiny drop, Mad'm'zelle. Eh, there is none? Mais comment Ça? How can one drink a jus (coffee) without gniolle? Mad'm'zelle is not kind." He would wheedle a bird from the bushes, but happily for our strength of mind there is no drink stronger than jus in the canteen, a fact he finds it exceedingly difficult to believe. We know that when at last he accepts defeat he is convinced that fat bottles lie hidden under the counter to be brought forth for one whose powers of persuasion are greater than his. He loads his bowls on a tray, carries them by some occult means unbroken through the throng, and has his reward when the never-failing ceremony of clinking bowls or glasses with Bonne chance! or Bonne SantÉ! or À vous, prefaces the feast.

A pretty rite that of the French. Never did two comrades drink together in the canteen without doing it reverence. Never did I, visiting a refugee, swallow, for my sins, vin ordinaire rouge in which a lump of sugar had been dissolved without first clinking glasses with my hosts and murmuring a "Good health," or "Good luck," and feeling strangely and newly in sympathy with them as I did so. The little rite invested commonplace hospitality with grace and spiritual meaning.

VI

However, you must not think that the canteen kept us in a state of soppy sentiment, or even of perfervid sympathy. Sanity was the mood that suited it best. Presence of mind the quality that made for success. A sense of humour the saving grace that made both the former possible. When a thin, dark individual leans upon the counter for half an hour or more, silent, ruminative, pondering—it is a quiet night, no rush—gather your forces together. His eyes follow you wherever you go, you see revelations hovering on his lips. You become absorbed in ham or sausage (horse-sausage is incredibly revolting), but your absorption cannot last. Even sausages fail to charm, and then the dark one sees his opportunity. He leans towards you ... His faith in himself must be immense.... Does he really think that a journey to Paris at 2 a.m. in an omnibus train and a snowstorm can tempt you? If we had consoled all the lonely poilus who offered us—temporarily—their hands, their hearts and their five sous a day we should now be confirmed bigamists.

Or it may be that you are busy and contemplation of sausage unnecessary. Then he sets up a maddening DÎtes, dÎtes, dÎtes, Mad'm'zelle, that drives you to distraction. To silence him is impossible. Indifference leaves him unmoved. He is like a clock in a nightmare that goes on striking ONE!

That he has an eye for beauty goes without saying. "VoilÀ, une jolie petite brune! Vas-y." So two vagabonds catching sight of a decorative canteener, and off they go to discuss the price of ham, for only by such prosaic means can Sentiment leap over the counter. He addresses you by any and every name that comes into his head. "La mÈre," "la patronne" (these before he grasped the fact that the canteen was an oeuvre and not a commercial enterprise), "la petite," "la belle," "la belle Marguerite," "la FrisÉe," "la Dame aux Lunettes," "la petite Rose," and many others I have forgotten.

Indeed, the French aptitude for nicknames based on physical attributes was constantly thrust on us. The refugees, finding our own names uncomfortable upon the tongue, fell back on descriptive nomenclature. "La Blonde," "la Blanche," for the fair-haired. "La Grande," "la Belle," "la belle Dame au Lunettes," "la petite bleue," "la Directrice," "la grande dame maigre." And once when a bill was in dispute in a shop the proprietress exclaimed, "Is it that you wish to know who bought the goods? It was la petite qui court toujours et qui est toujours si pressÉe" (the little lady who always runs and is always in such a hurry). As a verbal snapshot it has never been equalled. It would have carried conviction in any court in the country.

But most of all the heart of the soldier rejoices when he can call you his marraine (godmother). That we, mere English, pursued by ardent souls, should sometimes be compelled to send out S.O.S. messages to our comrades; that, feeling the mantle of our dignity slipping perilously from our shoulders, we should cast aside our remote isolation and engage the worker in the "next department" in animated conversation, was only to be expected. But our hearts rejoiced and the imps in us danced ecstatically when Madame D. was discovered one day hiding in the office. She, splendid ally that she always was, volunteered to sit at the receipt of custom on certain afternoons each week, and, clad in her impenetrable panoply, at once suavely polite, gracious but infinitely aloof, to sell tickÉs with subdued but inextinguishable enjoyment. But a lonely poilu strayed by who badly needed a marraine, and so persistent was he in his demands, so irresistible in his pleadings, so embarrassing in his attentions, Madame, the panoply melting and dignity snatched by the winds, fled to the office, from whence no persuasions could lure her till the lonely one had gone his unsatisfied way.

It is the man from the pays envahi who, most of all, needs a marraine, e. g. a sympathetic, sensible woman who will write to him, send him little gifts and take an interest in his welfare. Because all too often he stands friendless and alone. His relatives, his family having remained in their homes, between him and them lies silence more awful than death. He is a prey to torturing fears, he endures much agony of mind, dark forebodings hang about him like a miasma poisoning all his days. No news! And his loved ones, in the hands of a merciless foe, may be in the very village the French or the British are shelling so heavily! From his place in the trenches he may see the tall chimneys, the church spire in the distance. He has been gazing yearningly at them for two years, has seen landmarks crumble and steeples totter as the guns searched out first one, then another.... A marraine may well save the reason of such men as these. She can assuredly rob life of much of its bitterness, and inspire it with hope and courage to endure.

One of these men who came from Stenay told us of his misery. He had done well in the army, had been promoted, might have been commissioned, but his loneliness, the vultures of conjecture that tugged at his heart, his longing and his grief overwhelmed him one night, and seeking distraction in unwise ways he fell into dire trouble, and was reduced to the ranks....

And yet, though I write of these poor derelicts, it is the gay and gallant who holds my imagination. The thing of the "glad eye," and the swagger, the jest, "Going en permission, Mad'm'zelle," the happiest thing in France! It is he, the irrepressible, who carries gaiety through the streets as he rolls by in his camions; he sings, he plays discordant instruments, he buys couronnes of bread, he shouts to the women. "Ah, la belle fille!" "Mad'm'zelle, on aura un rendez-vous lÀ-bas." Sometimes he is more explicit:—intermittent deafness is an infirmity of psychological value in the War Zone! And he thoroughly enjoys the canteen. He likes "ploom-cak," he likes being waited on by Les Anglaises, he likes the small refinements (though now and then he "borrows" the forks), he appreciates generosity, he is by no means ungrateful (see him pushing a few coppers across the counter with a shamefaced "C'est pour l'oeuvre"), and at his worst, least controlled, most objectionable, he can be shamed into silence or an apology by a few firm or tactful words.

A bewildering thing! If I wrote of him for ever I should not be able to explain him.