It was at Christmas time that we came most to realise the broken family circles in all our villages. There was not one household which did not have some hostage avec les Boches. Of the pitiful remnant, the old men—there were no young ones—were to me the most appealing. I shall never forget the fÊte in the hill village of Douilly, well up to the front, a village completely destroyed, whose inhabitants were living in cellars. On the brow of the hill, facing the sunset, stood the white stone church. It had been used by the Germans as a barracks, and had not been reconsecrated, so that we were given permission to hold our party there. Cold, bare, yet beautiful with the sunlight falling in rainbow colours on the groined arches, was the old church. At the bases of the pillars, we deposited our sacks of presents; most of them for the children, but one each for the women and the men. The latter were in my charge. Only three came hobbling up from the outskirts of the crowd. “But is this all?” I asked, as they chose the size of package which seemed to each most desirable. “Are there no other men in the village?” The old men consulted together. “There is GrandpÈre Cordon,” suggested one, “and Jean, who has rheumatism,” “and blind Pierre——” “Nous sommes dix,” came the answer, finally. “Shall we take the presents to the rest?”

“Nous sommes dix!” It was the answer which might have been made in Canizy. According to the number of inhabitants, it might represent the proportion of the male population left anywhere in the rÉgion dÉvastÉe. Not one was able-bodied. In Canizy there were, for example, the lame mayor of whom I have spoken; his four contemporaries, verging on sixty, one a heavy drinker, another one-armed, a third in need of an operation, a fourth suffering from heart disease. Even the latter had been taken away, but as he said, when the German doctor put down his ear to listen, he threw up his hands, and gave the officers a good piece of his mind for having imported a useless consumer of food. So he was encouraged to make his way back.

Of an older generation are two of the servitors of the ChÂteau, the one the feeble gardener, the other the bedridden husband of the laundress, who has not worked for many years. There is M. Tabary also, the grandfather of Germaine, who has his own peculiar sorrow in his granddaughter’s visible disgrace. A Boche baby will never outlive its stigma while the memory of the Great War remains. M. Tabary is sick and frail. It was he who, persuaded at last to come to the Dispensary, paused in going out to doff his old cap with a courtly bow and to address the doctors with a “Merci, mes demoiselles, merci; je suis content.”

It was a fortunate circumstance, however,—for I cannot think it intentional on the part of the Germans—that all of these old men, more or less in need of care, had either wives or other feminine relatives to give it to them. Not so circumstanced was M. Augustin. Smooth-shaven save for a white fringe of beard, his fresh-coloured but anxious face appeared one day at the ChÂteau. Thither he had gone to deliver a load of hay. But the particular lady who had contracted to buy it being unexpectedly absent, M. Augustin was disturbed. His language gave one an impression of vigour which was borne out by subsequent acquaintance. On the saint’s day of the village, he shared honours with young Lydie in being the life of the party, by contributing a song and a quaint peasants’ dance. He was to be met with frequently along the roads, with blue-visored cap, brown corduroys and stout cane. As his neighbours said: “M. Augustin, il voyage toujours partout.” Still, he took time to do chores, like chopping wood for Mme. Juliette, to hoe in his garden, and to keep his house. The latter was, strictly speaking, a shed. It had two windows, however, through which, in the absence of the owner, I made inventory. A broken stove was propped against a home-made chimney; a plank table stood beneath the window; a chair, and a rough chest completed the furniture. On the table, instead of a lamp, was a bottle containing a candle; beside it were a bowl and a frying pan.

Chiefly from the neighbours, I learned that M. Augustin was a widower, that he had been the village cobbler, and that he preferred to live alone. Now, we had shoe-making tools among our stores, so one day I asked him if he would not like some. “No, Mademoiselle, I thank you,” he replied. “My eyes are no longer clear; I cannot see well.” I was more successful with other suggestions, however. A little nest of dishes pleased him greatly; a new stove was installed, and a bed, and what was perhaps even more greatly appreciated, a lamp. The evidence of his appreciation took the form of whitewash on walls and ceiling; the cobwebs vanished from the windows; and a shelf appeared for the dishes behind the stove. It may be that M. Augustin will now be more content with his own fireside, and less drawn to visit the wineshops of Ham and Nesle.

I never saw M. Augustin at mass, where the village transformed itself on occasion from weekday caps and kerchiefs and sabots to its conventional and unbecoming best. Therefore I must needs infer that his face was shaven daily, and his suit always clean, for his own satisfaction. The moral stamina shown by this is noteworthy, and characteristic of the peasantry of our district. We ourselves in our living conditions found cleanliness next to godliness in this respect at least, in that it was hard to attain. But cui bono seemed never to have disturbed the habits of M. Augustin.

Another sprightly old gentleman was M. Touret. His quarters were more spacious than those of his neighbour, for he lived in a barn. Overhead, hay piled from eaves to roof-tree helped to keep out the cold, and there was one window. As he himself said when asked if he wanted anything: “What would you? I am warm; I have a chair, a stove and a bed. If the young people were here—perhaps. But we who are old, we shall not live long, we have enough.” M. Touret, however, did not live alone. The mother of his son’s wife had taken pity on him after the Germans deported his two sons and their families, and had invited him to share her barn. There were three housed there altogether, for with them lived her son. M. Touret was oftenest found on a bench between the window and the stove, poring through his spectacles over the daily paper. Mme. Clara was usually busy with some savoury cooking, and M. Albert on the occasion of my first visit held the centre of the floor with saw-horse and axe. A chair was offered at once, and we all sat down to talk. M. Touret, however, kept glancing at his paper, or regarded us over the rims of his spectacles. Presently he broke in: “As for you, I do not know what you may be, but as for me, I am a Christian.” In the midst of a conversation about fodder and furniture, the effect was arresting, until one realised from his point of view the strangeness of our position. What, he must have queried, are these young American women doing here? We were certainly different from the French ladies of family who nursed the soldiers, or took over whole communities to house and feed. French women would never have walked as we did, muddy-shoed and knapsacked, alone over the fields. They might have been more understanding, at least their ways would have been more conventional and better understood.

In fact, on another occasion M. Touret asked me why I had come to France. “Monsieur, my father was a soldier; I cannot fight, but in this war I, too, want to help.” “Your father was a soldier? Ah yes, that would be in the Civil War, in ’64—I remember it well. And what rank did he hold? Was he a general?” “But no, Monsieur; only a common soldier.” “A common soldier?” He thought a moment. “But not like ours, because in America you are not a military nation, and depend on volunteers.” My face must have expressed astonishment. “Look you, Mademoiselle; before the war it was my habit to read. I read every year as many as two hundred volumes. I had a large library in a cabinet. The Germans burned my books.” He rose, picked up something from a bench behind the stove and handed it to me. It proved to be a charred and mildewed copy of a history; the history of England in the time of Henry the Eighth. Mutilated as it was, the pages showed a beautiful clear type and exquisite engravings. It was a good example of the printing of Abbeville, famous for its engravers and binders since the days of its first printing press in 1484.

“Would you not like some books, then?” I ventured.

“What sort of books? Not magazines.” He looked contemptuously at one that I had in my hand. “Me, I like stories. See what I bought yesterday.” He brought from a chest of drawers a gaudy paper volume entitled “La Morte d’Amour.”

Knowing that our library contained no such light literature, I continued, “Would you perhaps like Dumas?”

“Dumas? ‘The Three Musketeers’?” His wrinkled face lighted. “I know them. Another book I liked the Germans loaned me when they were here. It was by an Englishman—B-u-l-w-e-a-r—‘The Last Days of Pompeii’—a very interesting book.”

“Tell me,” he went on a little later, “some one has said that you have no twilight in North America. Is it true?”

It seeming in his mind to be a reflection upon our country, I tried my best to dissipate this impression by citing the great size of the United States, and its varying climatic conditions. But I could not truthfully say that we had the lingering orange sunsets and afterglows of pink and mauve and applegreen which I knew were in his mind, and with which I too became familiar on the plain of Picardy.

The last time I saw M. Touret was on a white and wintry morning when I had risen even earlier than the Villagers or M. the chaplain, to attend the Village mass. In a golden-brown corduroy which might have been the twin of M. Augustin’s, I spied M. Touret on the path ahead of me, homeward bound after the service. I ran to catch up.

“Good morning, Monsieur, and how are you?”

“O, doucement, doucement,” he answered. “And you?”

“The books, did you like them?” I inquired, for his Christmas present had consisted of three.

“O, well enough; but one was not true. It was called ‘Contes de la Lune.’ I did not read it. Another (this in reference to Tourguenieff) was by a Russian; and you know well, in France we do not love Russia, now. A Russian indeed! The third,—well Jules Verne is always interesting. Ça ira.”

Somewhat discouraged, I recalled what Mme. Clara had told me once in an effort to soften the old man’s brusqueness. “He is old; he is full of crotchets, you understand.” But Madame herself appeared to me to be quite as old, though I had the wit not to compliment her politeness thus maladroitly. Perhaps it was because of this honesty, entirely unaffected, that of all the households in my village, I enjoyed most hers and M. Touret’s. There one found a freeborn fellowship, which, like the mellow twilight, belongs to Picardy. It is a timbre resonant in the older generation; that generation which endured the invasion of 1870, as well as the invasion of 1914. It is a survival of many wars, of many hardships, a spirit akin to that fortitude which has made our own country,—a common language that we, who came from the ends of the earth, could understand.