At noon time, on dispensary days, I sometimes lunched with the doctors in Mme. LefÈvre’s kitchen. It was a heterogeneous spot, with two beds (one being stored for a niece), two cats, and a few neighbours always sitting near the fire. Usually the neighbours were waiting for la factrice. A tap at the window, and Madame ran to open it, and received a handful of letters which the postmistress brought each day by bicycle from Nesle. Were it cold, she herself, a capable, pleasant-faced woman, came in to join the group for a moment, threw back her long cape, and warmed her numb hands. Meantime spectacles were brought out and the envelopes scanned. It was not alone of the return of the refugees that the village lived in hope. They might come unannounced, but the soldiers, en permission,—that was different. Any day Albert or Henri might write that he was coming home!

And when they came! It was in Mme. LefÈvre’s kitchen again that I had the pleasure of seeing the greeting given to a soldier in faded blue. A bronzed and bearded man he was, the father of a family. But the family alas! the wife and the children, were avec les Boches. M. Huillard seemed to have returned therefore, unheralded. As he opened the door, the neighbours rose with exclamations; the men grasping his hands, the women presenting one cheek and then the other for a kiss. Questions followed: Where had he been stationed? At Verdun, and, more lately, at St. Quentin. “At St. Quentin? Have you seen Narcisse, then?” Mme. Carpentier inquired eagerly. “Yes, your husband was well. I have a letter.” And M. Huillard fumbled in his pockets and brought out a thumbed envelope with the cramped address: Mme. Regina Carpentier, Canizy, Somme.

An account of the recent bombardment is curtailed by M. Huillard’s own desire for information. This is his first visit to the village since his leave-taking during the tragic mobilisation of 1914. He has known, of course, of the German occupation; he has heard the terrible news of the deportation of wife and children. He has seen other devastated villages. But to-day, for the first time, he looks upon the ruins of his own home. I saw him standing alone that afternoon before the sagging door, which bore the staring military number 25, and beside it, chalked inscriptions in German and in English jostling each other: Gott mit uns. Hot ? buns. Within, thistles grew about the hearth. M. Huillard uttered no sound, and shed no tears, but his face, as he turned away, was set in a white hatred, and his right hand rose to heaven in an unspoken vow.

No soldier on his ten days’ leave remained idle. Mme. Cordier’s handsome son, looking even more handsome in the uniform of an Alpine chasseur, was no exception. In fact, when I first saw him, the uniform, including his decoration, was covered by a mason’s white blouse. Up on a ladder, he was white-washing the walls of the stable in which his family then lived. A huge brick manger in a dark corner was startingly brought out by his brush. It served as a kitchen table, and was laughingly referred to as one of the conveniences of the mÉnage. In another home, I found one day a soldier-brother knocking up a cupboard out of rough planks. Cheerful was the sound of his vigorous hammer strokes, and cheerful the sight of a young and merry face among the ruins. It mattered not whether he had a bed to sleep in—one of the most difficult requests we had to refuse was that of a bed to a soldier—the younger poilu en permission was always gay. If his mother worked, he helped her; and day after day through the Christmas holidays one of these boys walked to the ChÂteau each morning to help Mme. Topin chop our wood. I happened in upon her on the eve of his departure. Her tiny cabin was full of an odour most appetising after my long day’s walk. Over a glowing fire, she was turning waffles, “to put in his knapsack,” she explained. But he had one the less for my having called; and over it his mother sprinkled half of the last teacupful of sugar she possessed.

Mme. Topin had another son also serving with the colours, who came home quite often to see his wife, because he was making a slow recovery from gas-injured lungs. She, during his absence, taught in the village school, while her old mother kept house and took care of three-year-old Guy. M. Topin it was who showed me around his ruined yard one day, pointing out the place of the five-room cottage, and telling me the colours of the roses whose blackened stalks still remained against the walls. “This was white and very fragrant; that yellow. I planted it on Guy’s birthday. Here we had a bed of mignonette. Take care, Guy—pardon, Mademoiselle.” And he stooped to wrench away from the child’s fingers a long cartridge picked up in the dÉbris. “A German bullet,” he explained, handing it to me. “There are hundreds of them about.”

As I have said, the soldier en permission expected to work. Yet I know of one who was assigned to more of a-task than he relished. Him, hapless being, I first encountered down by the old ChÂteau at Canizy, hunting rabbits for a stew. But as I remembered the dimensions of his mother’s baraque, it seemed to me that self-interest might prompt him to leave his hunting to assist me for a time. Besides his grandmother, his mother, a brother and a sister, there was an aunt who had arrived to lodge with the family,—a rÉfugiÉe from near PÉronne. Utterly destitute and unhappy was the aunt. The fact that her husband and her daughter were still in the slavery from which she had escaped, would be enough to sadden any one, but she whispered to me that her sister did not make her welcome. At the time, we were much in need of a domestic at our camp. “Would you like to come and work for us, perhaps,” I suggested. “We have no lodging, but I will find you a shelter in Hombleux from which you can walk over with Madame our cook.” Rash promise, to which I added a complete outfit of furniture and two francs a day. The offer was accepted.

From pillar to post, I then went to Hombleux. A regiment en repos had been quartered there since I had made arrangements with the baker’s wife for a room in her tidy loft. Regiments succeeded one another rapidly, and during their sojourns there was literally no lodging to be had. I was finally directed to a corner in the outbuilding of a former convent school which was considered habitable. My soldier I pressed into service to assist its quondam tenant, who had moved out because it was so cold, in removing the vegetables, wood and furniture she still had stored there. He looked on while a resourceful young girl pasted oiled paper on the iron window frame; he went to the woods and chopped and hauled a tree for fuel; he brought over at the same time a plank with which to mend the door. This took a day, which I, meantime, spent in Ham. There I bought a bed, mattress and bedding, a stove, a pipe, an elbow for the same, a chair, a table, a metal wash basin and a pitcher, a saucepan, a little set of dishes, a lamp, a brush and a broom. It is surprising how many things are necessary for even a primitive existence. Two days more were consumed in setting these few articles in place, and all the neighbours helped.

The snow had come, meantime, and the soldier returned to rabbit hunting. As he remarked on pointing out the little roads beaten by them through the weeds, “They look much better en casserole.” It remained for our own soldier at the chÂteau to bring our domestic to her new home. One frosty morning, Tambour and the cart awaited me after breakfast, and I set forth. Old Tambour appeared none too steady on the trot to which I urged him. “Ça glisse,” explained Carlos, and we relapsed into a walk. In fact, all the way to Canizy we walked, the shrewd wind biting nose and ears and coursing under the blankets on the high seat. Carlos got out, winding the lines about the whipstock. The horse floundered through drifts, and he, adjusting his cap to the veering gusts, trudged at his head. At length, we debouched upon the direct road to the village. But, barring our way was a machine-gun squad. Already the red signals had been posted and the route was dÉfendu. Even as we halted, came volleys like staccato hail. On other occasions, with honking horn, we have run this gauntlet, the sentries halting the fire for us to pass. But to-day, I judged it safer to turn down into a hollow, and skirt the action. Thus delayed, it was near noon when we turned into the gate of the ChÂteau at Canizy.

We were expected, however; coffee was hot upon the stove, and the soldier en permission served it, stirring the cups in rotation with the one family spoon. Madame, our new domestic, was ready also, with quite a store of bedding and clothing done up in a sack. Two kisses apiece, a last admonition, a promise to come to see her on Sunday, and she climbed up over the wheel. To her, I imagine, the journey to Hombleux seemed, like a voyage to a foreign country. Nor was she welcomed, as I afterwards learned, by her new neighbours in the commune. It seems, one should have gone to the mayor first for permission to install her; and certainly one should have paid more money to that inconvenienced lady, the former tenant. As Madame said, “She talks most unkindly.” To add to the newcomer’s hardships, the winter wind ripped the oiled linen from the window, and her nephew, the soldier, never returned to mend the door. “Bien mal logÉe,” having to walk a mile and a half through the snow at dawn and after dark, it is not to be wondered at that she made a final choice of her sister’s sharp tongue and warm fire, and left our employ.

Akin to the soldier en permission is the soldier en repos. Of the latter class was our Carlos, who was given us by M. le Sous-PrÉfet, together with a horse and two carts. He was to report during his stay to no one but Mlle. la Directrice, nor would the authorities take any direct cognisance of him save in case of her complaint. A southerner was Carlos, a dapper man from the Basque provinces. There he had a wife and two children whom he had not seen for three years. But he expected a permission shortly, he said; and that may have reconciled him to the uncongenial hewing of wood and drawing of water to which he was detailed. Day long he drove, or chopped trees, or cleaned the stable, as advised. His only diversion appeared to be our milk maid,—a harmless enough one, I presume; for she told us proudly and often how she received a letter from her soldier-husband every day. Nevertheless, there was visible sadness when one morning Carlos announced that he had been transferred. And was he then going home? No, his permission had been taken away; he was returning to the front. He and Tambour were to join the artillery. Poor old Tambour, faithful, plodding; one knew not for which to feel more compassion, the horse or the master, as one pictured them dragging into position the grey seventy-fives! “Good-bye, then,” I said, “I am sorry.” “O, what would you,” he replied. “So it goes. But you, you are leaving also. Some one has told me, for America—La bonne chance, Mademoiselle.”

Unlike Carlos only in that they came by regiments, were the shifting troops taken at intervals from the trenches for a brief rest in our more habitable villages. One saw them, a weary line of blue, marching down the roads, flanked by stretcher bearers, and followed by a provision train. Once settled, they stood about the corners of the streets or in the gaping doorways; a disconsolate enough addition to the ruins. Or at the camp kitchens, drawn up to one side, they grouped themselves around huge cauldrons of soup. Sometimes a more ambitious company set to work to clean up the village and built an outdoor bathing tank which was much in use. On one occasion, a dashing troop of blue devils gave military concerts each evening. An incongruous sight was the band, drawn sprucely up in a desolate courtyard, and a strangely stirring sound, the music floating through the empty streets, of Ce que c’est qu’ un drapeau. Often soldiers and even officers came over to see us at the ChÂteau and to ask for cigarettes or shoes. If one had time to listen, they talked for hours on the war. They were never boastful, these soldiers; they had a just estimate of the German strength of organisation; they had no illusions as to their own personal fate. Each one expected to die at his post. Patient, sturdy, intelligent, they gave one confidence that, however heavy the dawn bombardments, our lines would hold. And if our lines, then all the lines manned by them with such spiritual as well as physical courage. The morale of the poilu, unflinching, will yet win the war.