THE SEINE AT ROUEN

I don't know what the Seine at Rouen is like in times of peace-trade. They say war has quadrupled its congestion. I well believe it. The pool is crammed below the Grand Pont—there's nothing above but barge traffic—with ships disgorging at a frenzied rate at the uneven cobbled quays.

One can imagine the port lazing along before the War in the informal and leisurely way that is French. The French enjoy living. They are industrious enough for that. But they don't take their work hardly nor continuously. They take it in chunks. It gets done. But there is no sort of inflexible determination in their method. The Egyptians, too, have not continuity, but with them the work does not get done. Both peoples work sporadically. But the Egyptian takes his chunk of work because he has to; the Frenchman because he likes it. That is the difference. The Egyptian is not industrious. The French like work, and therefore take it in tastes, never hogging it. They like to get the flavour of work. The Englishman who eats it down misses all that, and is commiserated by the French for the desecrating greed with which he attacks his task.

So you can envisage the quay in peace-time: the unsystematic and picturesque dumping of merchandise in the open quays, and the hum of leisured talk; the additions to the acres of wine-barrels under the elms beyond, and the subtractions from them; and the rich fruitiness of the bon arome soaking out of those casks. You get it now if you walk amongst them: walk through the shadowed wine-store on a hot day, and the odour hanging beneath the trees is a refreshment in itself. But in these days the lading and the discharge of the wine-ships is done feverishly and raucously, and too hurriedly for any attempt at arranging them on shore. The wine-ship lies there with the stuff piled monstrously on every yard of her deck, and it's being slung off as fast as may be. It's the only drink of the French soldier; there's as much urgency for its transit as for the off-loading of English supplies. Huge tanks stand as waggons on the adjoining railway and they wait to be filled, and so the vin ordinaire goes up in bulk that exceeds the content of many score of barrels.

The same urgency hurries off supplies from the ships. The Admiralty is shouting continuously for the completion of discharge. No ship, at this time, lies there at her ease. She fairly groans and creeks in travail of discharge. It proceeds as vigorously at night, under the flares, as by day. Hordes of labour battalions are handling it into the store-hangars, or into the waiting supply-trams, or into lorries. The parti-coloured French are trundling the wine-barrels hither and thither for store or for despatch. The rattle of cranes, the panting of lorries, the scream and rumble of trains, the shouting of orders, are deafening and incessant. Supply-ships, timber-ships, coal-ships, wine-ships, ammunition-ships, petrol-ships, are strung down-stream in a deafening queue. The base is a distractingly busy place.

Over against all that is the quiet domesticity of the barges. War doesn't hurry them, nor sap at the foundations of their family life. They'll sleep along the river, happen what may. General Joffre's professed aspiration aprÈs la guerre is to retire to a Seine barge, and finish there. He could choose nothing in sharper contrast with the turmoil of war. The reaction from Generalship could not well be borne in more complementary circumstances. The comfortable somnolence of a Seine barge is invincible. They are not yet requisitioned for the base purposes of war. They are a thing apart, and therefore have no call for busyness.

They are enormously long, and have a grace of outline unexampled in the world of barges. A Thames barge is stumpy and crude beside them. There is scope in their length for grace of line. Look down on them from the heights of Bonsecours, packed orderly amongst the Seine islands. Look at them in queue dreaming along in the wake of some fussy tug; either way you'll get their nobility of contour.

Each is a microcosm. They are self-contained as to family, burden, poultry, pony, cat and dog, rabbit-pen, and garden. The mother and daughter and the small boys all take a hand in pushing on the business of le pÈre. In fact, it is they who do the thing: he lounges and smokes and directs the policy. In the waist of the ship is the stable, with a pony that usually is white, and perhaps a cow, and the pens of hens, and the basketed rabbit-hutch. The boys pursue the dog round the potted plants when there's no work. In the same circumstances the mother and daughters sun themselves on the hatches. Children are born there to a lifelong sojourn in the craft. There they get their schooling, and there, until adolescence, they acquire their knowledge of the world. There probably is scope for a science of barge-psychology. Can one in reason expect a world war to intrude far into the life of a Seine barge? Hardly that.

They hold as much as a small ship; the journey to Paris is far and slow. They are cut off from the world almost as effectually as a marooned Swiss Family Robinson.

Hospital ships berth below the bridge, and are filled from the motor ambulances with an awful celerity. You may always know when an ambulance train is at the Rive Gauche Gare by the long procession of Red Cross motors streaming from the station over the Grand Pont to the hospital berth, and by the wide-eyed crowd making a slow-swaying cordon round the military police to watch the procession of stretchers ascending the gangways. The Red Cross ship may get her complement in two or three hours. Then she turns business-like and heads down-stream for le Havre. And then!—Blighty, for comfort and fitting alimentation, and home for the tortured.

The Seine is a tragic stream at Rouen. Corpses are fished up daily. Parisian suicides float down and are intercepted, and dogs and other beasts seem to get drowned in plenty. This is hard on so fair and happy a city. Why can't Paris look after her own weary-of-breath?

The Ile la Croix stands at the heart of the city. The Pont Corneille rests across it. The island is a town in itself, with theatres, churches, factories, baths, and thick residential quarters, and groves, and well-defined streets. Here is another little world in itself, consistent with the barges that lie about it.

All over the island—and, still more ubiquitously, all over the quay-sides—are girls and women hawking fruit and cakes and chocolate. The girls are pretty. They better custom by fooling English Tommies to the top of their bent by that French-Arcadian intersexual frankness of discourse and gesture of which English girls know so little, and which Tommy adores so ardently and furtively. This gives the right to put up the price. Tommy, in this land of vines, and in the season—finds himself paying her two francs a pound for grapes. "TrÈs cher aujourd'hui, Monsieur!"—"Mais oui, m'selle—voulez-vous m'embrasser?"—."Nothin' doin', ole shap!" ... These girls are quick-brained, as alertful in mind as you could expect by their well-moulded features and their lithe, straight bodies. There is no insistence, in France, upon the ugly vulgarism of rotundity in women and girls. The girls of France spell, in their bodies, anything but sombreness in spirit or clumsiness in brain. They have never been out of Rouen, but they fling repartee in Arabic at Australians as though they had lived in Cairo. Their only source of such an accomplishment is the Australian soldier himself, and the persistence of Arabic with him. And he does not go out of his way to teach anyone. He learns French with halting slowness, even when some Rouennaise is making efforts to teach him. But these girls take up his English and his incidental Arabic in their swift and light mental stride.